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heaven, remember: power to intercede for us in our grief;
power to obtain whatever we pray for if it be for the good
of our souls; power above all to obtain for us the grace to
repent if we be in sin. A great saint, saint Francis Xavier! A
great fisher of souls!
He ceased to shake his clasped hands and, resting them
against his forehead, looked right and left of them keenly at
his listeners out of his dark stern eyes.
In the silence their dark fire kindled the dusk into a taw-
ny glow. Stephen’s heart had withered up like a flower of the
desert that feels the simoom coming from afar.
*****
—REMEMBER ONLY THY LAST THINGS AND
THOU SHALT NOT SIN FOR EVER— words taken, my
dear little brothers in Christ, from the book of Ecclesiastes,
seventh chapter, fortieth verse. In the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Stephen sat in the front bench of the chapel. Father Ar-
nall sat at a table to the left of the altar. He wore about his
shoulders a heavy cloak; his pale face was drawn and his
voice broken with rheum. The figure of his old master, so
strangely re-arisen, brought back to Stephen’s mind his life
at Clongowes: the wide playgrounds, swarming with boys;
the square ditch; the little cemetery off the main avenue of
limes where he had dreamed of being buried; the firelight
on the wall of the infirmary where he lay sick; the sorrowful
face of Brother Michael. His soul, as these memories came
back to him, became again a child’s soul.
—We are assembled here today, my dear little broth-

132 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man