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CASHEL BYRON'S PROFESSION

By George Bernard Shaw




PROLOGUE




I


Moncrief House, Panley Common. Scholastic establishment for the sons of
gentlemen, etc.

Panley Common, viewed from the back windows of Moncrief House, is
a tract of grass, furze and rushes, stretching away to the western
horizon.

One wet spring afternoon the sky was full of broken clouds, and the
common was swept by their shadows, between which patches of green
and yellow gorse were bright in the broken sunlight. The hills to the
northward were obscured by a heavy shower, traces of which were drying
off the slates of the school, a square white building, formerly a
gentleman's country-house. In front of it was a well-kept lawn with a
few clipped holly-trees. At the rear, a quarter of an acre of land was
enclosed for the use of the boys. Strollers on the common could hear, at
certain hours, a hubbub of voices and racing footsteps from within the
boundary wall. Sometimes, when the strollers were boys themselves,
they climbed to the coping, and saw on the other side a piece of common
trampled bare and brown, with a few square yards of concrete, so worn
into hollows as to be unfit for its original use as a ball-alley. Also
a long shed, a pump, a door defaced by innumerable incised inscriptions,
the back of the house in much worse repair than the front, and about
fifty boys in tailless jackets and broad, turned-down collars. When the
fifty boys perceived a stranger on the