he can do so Dan jumps out of the bed in queer white clothes, with the stick in his hand, and goes over and puts his back against it.)
Michael. Son of God deliver us!
Equal extravagance and equal grotesquerie, and irony biting beyond any in any other of his plays, you will find in "The Well of the Saints."
This, too, is built up out of Synge's experience of life in Aran and Wicklow. Old Mourteen, a "dark man," who taught him Gaelic on Aranmor, suggested Martin Doul, the chief character of the play, and it was Mourteen told him, too, the story of the well whose water would give sight to blind eyes. A story told Synge on Inishere supplied the saint, and a tramp in Wicklow the thoughts of Martin Doul and Mary Doul as to the glory their hair would be to them in age. As you read his travel sketches, in fact, you are always coming on passages that very evidently are the suggestions for situations in this play or that, and sometimes more than suggestions—stories and situations and very phrases that you remember as on the lips of the peasants in his plays. In these travel sketches, too, you find the background of the plays. There is but the germ of "The Playboy of the Western World" in the story told Synge in Inishmaan of the hiding there from the police of the man that killed his father, but there is old Mourteen's comparison of an unmarried man to "an old jackass straying in the rocks," which later we find transferred to Michael James Flaherty almost as Synge heard it—"an old braying jackass straying upon the rocks."
