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till it was rounded like a song. I give you the bare bones, which is all I have of it.
    In the time of that war there were no doubt many deaths, and many deaths that were no better than murder. Of course it was my father's duty to bury some of these in his neat graveyard.
    Being fourteen I had one foot in childhood still, and one foot in womanhood. At the little nuns' school I attended I was not indifferent to the boys that lurched past the school gates at the close of lessons, indeed I seem to remember thinking a sort of music rose from them, a sort of human noise that I did not understand. How I heard music arising from such rough forms I do not know at this distance. But such is the magician-ship of girls, that they can transform mere clay into large and classic ideas.
    So I was paying but half heed to my father and his world. I was more concerned with my own mysteries, such as, how to get a curl into my wretched hair. I spent many hours labouring at this with a collar iron of my mother's, which she used to iron my father's Sunday shirt. It was a slim, small object that heated quickly on the fender, and if I laid out my straight yellow tresses on the table, I hoped by some alchemy to tease a curl into them. So I was preoccupied with the fears and ambitions of my age.
    Nevertheless I was often in my father's temple, doing my lessons as may be, enjoying the little grate of coals he kept burning there, by grace of his fuel stipend. I learned my lessons and listened to him singing 'Marble Halls' or the like. And worried about my hair.
    What I would give to have a few strands of that straight yellow hair now.
    My father buried anyone that was given him to bury. In peaceful days he buried mostly the old and the sick, but in days of war he more often than not was given the corpse of a boy or nearly boy.
    These caused him grief in a manner he never showed over the aged and infirm. He thought those latter deaths were simple and right, and whether the families and mourners wept or were silent at the graveside, he knew there was a sense of proper term and justice. Often he knew the old soul that was to be interred, and would share memories and anecdotes if that seemed pleasant and generous to do so. He was a sort of diplomat of grief in those instances.
    But the bodies of those slain in the war grieved him mightily, differently. As a Presbyterian he might be thought to have no place in the Irish story. But he understood rebellion. In his bedroom in a drawer he kept a memorial booklet for the Rising of 1916, with photographs of the principals involved, and a calendar of battles and sorrows. The only wicked thing he thought that Rising enshrined was its peculiar Catholic nature, from which of course he felt excluded.
    It was the deaths of the young that grieved him. After all it was just a few years after the slaughter of the Great War. Indeed from Sligo had gone out hundreds of men to fight in Flanders, in the years around the Rising, and since the slain of that war could not be buried at home, it might be said those dozens of men were buried in my father, in the secret graveyard of his thoughts. Now in the civil war, more deaths, and always the young. There wasn't one man of fifty in Sligo fought in the civil war anyhow.
    He did not rail against these matters, he knew that there were always wars in every generation, but he gave himself to these things in a curiously professional way, since he was after all the titular custodian of the dead, as if he were a king of absences.
    Fr Gaunt himself was young and might have been expected to feel a special kinship for the slain. But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music.
    But let me not speak against him. He went everywhere in Sligo in his ministry, he walked into bleak