152 My Little Farm 



plished, than any good which could come to either 

 from the evil of the other. 



The two kinds of visitor in whom alone I can 

 see hope are the man from a foreign country, 

 frankly in search of fact, and the local peasant, 

 suspiciously escaping from falsehood to get at 

 the terrible truth about the better dinner awaiting 

 him in the soil. Very often, the less " educated " 

 the better. - The man who thinks he knows is the 

 most hopeless of all, and his fields bear witness 

 to it in every townland. They come to me 

 impelled by motives pathetically mixed, chiefly 

 terror of the truth and greed for its results. They 

 are all quite prepared to take the truth from me 

 in farming. What they fear is that they might 

 hear the truth from me in anything esle, and there 

 are other things, even of more profound import- 

 ance than farming, in which I am still more 

 competent to tell them the truth. It is 

 desparately suspected, perhaps with reason, that 

 my attack on the soil is merely to reveal the 

 higher things through it, in a community held 

 unfit to see anything at the top unless through the 

 lowest medium of vision. Men at once sagacious 

 and friendly have often begged me to restrict my 

 mental interests absolutely to the soil, suggesting 

 that I might become " a great man " by strictly 

 ignoring everyhting higher than the ground. I 

 have not done so, but the lesson is not lost. See 

 how eloquently it reveals the inwardness of Irish 



" greatness." 



Just outside the face of our limestone escarp- 



