‘Home Sickness’: James Bryden comes home from the Bowery (NY) after an illness to re-visit his Irish village home; he thinks of marrying Margaret Dirken, but the pull of the Bowery, the dislike of clerical authority and the prospect of decay and boredom back in rural Ireland drive him away again; once in America, he is striken with homesickness: ‘The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills.’ (End.)

‘Patchwork’. the Church architect wants £200 for the church walls; Mary Byrne and Ned Kavanagh have only £2 instead of the £5 that Fr. Maguire expects for marrying them, and he refuses; Mary and Ned have the wedding party and spend the night together; when he hears of this scandal, he turns to his Fr. Stafford.

‘The Window’: Biddy M’Hale, enriched from her ‘hins’ [poultry], is asked to pay for the walls but eventually gets her stained glass window, an object that supplies the sense of beauty and happiness denied on account of an accident in youth which caused her to be overlooked for marriage: ‘The things of this world are no longer realities to her. Her realities are what she sees and hears in that window.’ (1976 Edn., ed. Richard Cave, p.89).

‘A Play-House in the Waste’: Father James embarks on a theatre project in place of the more conventional building of relief roads, in the hope of emulating the mystery plays at Oberammergau; a wind blows down the wall of the theatre, leading the people to suppose it the punishment of God; a leading girl, playing the role of Good Deed in Everyman , a Latin play translated into Irish, becomes pregnant; her widowed mother ties her up and kills her child, burying it near the playhouse; when a storm comes three days after, the child is seen pulling thatch out of the roof; later on, the priest sees a white thing and baptises it with bog-water; he refuses to narrator’s offer to raise money in Dublin for renewal of the roof.

‘The Wedding Gown’: Margaret Kirwin (née O’Dwyer) comes back in old age to stay with relations near the Big House of the Roche family; she treasures her wedding gown but when she hears her neice Molly crying because she cannot go to the servants’ ball at the Big House without a dress, she offers it to her; she waits up for Molly, dreaming of her wedding; Molly, at the dance, has a premonition that something has happened to her aunt, breaks off during a dance with Mr Roche, and returns home to find her dead, her fear of death giving way to curiosity.

‘Almsgiving’: The unnamed narrator gives alms to a beggar, presuming his life to be unbearably miserable; forgetting to do so on one occasion, he hardens his heart against him on the grounds that he need not support a life that should no tbe lived, and then repents his lack of charity; afterwards he inquires of the beggar and discovers that he has friends who likewise help him to holidays, that he accepts his lot, and that his sufferings are bearable after all; the narrator ‘seemed to see farther into life than [he] had ever seen before’.

‘The Wild Goose’ (Pts. 1-VIII): Ned Carmady, born in Birmingham, has lived an adventurous life in America and fought in Cuba; he comes to Ireland and settles in Co. Dublin, where he meets and marries Catherine Cronin, a Gaelic league enthusiast, the daughter of a rich dairy farmer (very like Katharine Tynan in her family circumstances); she encourages him to take up a politic career in the Home Rule movement; he develops an anti-clerical vein in public speaking, very much at odds with her intensely Catholic sensibilities; their lives grow sunder and he eventually returns to exile, ‘at one moment ashamed of what he had done, and overjoyed that he had done it’; much of the story is concerned with his reflections on the enslavement of the Irish to their priests (viz., her confessor Fr. Brennan), and the forced emigration of all those who prefer ‘joy’ to moral oppression and celibacy; relations between husband and wife, though circumscribed at first by her Catholic modesty, are marked by mutual understanding of their differences - presumably another lesson about sophisticated codes of living.

‘The Way Back’ [removed from 2nd and subsequent edns:]: Harding meets Lucy Delaney in London; she has burnt down her school and run away to go on the stage; Harding wants to make love to her but is cautious; when he finds detectives watching him, he goes to Dublin to seek out her parents; she marries Mr Wainscott, a mathematical instrument-maker from Chicago; at the close Rodney, Harding and Carmady talk of the plight of Ireland and the beauty of Italy; Harding ends by expressing his love for Ireland: ‘all your interesting utterances about the Italian Renaissance would not interest me half so much as what Paddy Durkin and Father Pat will say to me on the roadside.’ (1931 edn. incl. ‘Fugitives’, based on the material of ‘In the Clay’ and ‘The Way Back’; and incl. also a revised version of ‘The Wild Goose’.)