The man with the chloride of lime opened the tunic and shirt of the
dead man and brought out an identity disc.
"Irish," he said, "Munster Fusiliers. What's this?" he asked, taking a
string of beads with a little shiny crucifix on the end of it, from the
dead man's neck.
"It's his rosary," I said, and my mind saw in a vivid picture a
barefooted boy going over the hills of Corrymeela to morning Mass,
with his beads in his hand. On either side rose the thatched cabins of
the peasantry, the peat smoke curling from the chimneys, the little
boreens running through the bushes, the brown Irish bogs, the heather
in blossom, the turf stacks, the laughing colleens....
"Here's a letter," said the sanitary man; "it was posted last
Christmas. It's from a girl, too."