Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/73

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ouring after him. I began the usual stunt on the parental iniquity that allowed youngsters to go out begging at eleven at night; but Tom, unheeding, was already chatting with the boy. "What's your name?" he asked. "Patsy Murphy, sir." "Well, Patsy, which would you rather, a shilling or a halfpenny?" "A halfpenny, sir," was the amazing reply. "Now tell me why?" questioned my husband, interested. "Well," said the kid, "I might get the halfpenny but I'd never get the shilling." His naïve philosophy got him both on this occasion.

In a speech on Dublin he said: "We cannot ignore the slums, for the slums are Dublin and Dublin is the slums." On the same occasion he remarked: "Dublin is in one respect like every other city. It is convinced that it possesses the most beautiful women and the worst corporation."

In a letter written from the boat on his way to France, with already a prophetic sense of death waiting for him on the battlefield, he wrote: "I have never felt my own essay 'On Saying Good-*bye' more profoundly aux tréfonds de mon cœur."

I shall quote the conclusion of the essay—

"There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death, normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors. The old woman" (an old woman previously mentioned who complained that