The castle hall was empty and grey, only the autumn dusk in the Gothic window; and the shuffle of the octogenarian butler sounding very dismal as he pottered across the tessellated pavement. On learning from him that Mr Martyn was still writing, I wandered from the organ into the morning-room, and sat by the fire, waiting for Edward's footstep. It came towards me about half an hour afterwards, slow and ponderous, not at all like the step of the successful dramatist; and my suspicions that his third act was failing him were aggravated by his unwillingness to tell me about the alterations he was making in it. All he could tell me was that he had been in Maynooth last summer, and had heard the priests declaring that they refused to stultify themselves; and as the word seemed to him typical of the country he would put it frequently into the mouths of his politicians.

How drama was to arise out of the verb, to stultify, did not seem clear, and in the middle of my embarrassment he asked me where I had been all the afternoon, brightening up somewhat when I told him that I had been to Coole. In a curious detached way he is always eager for a gossip, and we talked of Yeats and Lady Gregory for a long time, and of our walk round the lake, Edward rousing from my description of the swans to ask me where I had left the poet.

At the gate.

Why didn't you ask him to stay for dinner? And while I sought for an answer, he added: Maybe it's just as well you didn't, for today is Friday and the salmon I was expecting from Galway hasn't arrived.

But Yeats and I aren't Catholics.

My house is a Catholic house, and those who don't care to conform to the rule—

Your dogmatism exceeds that of an Archbishop; and I told him that I had heard my father say that the Archbishop of Tuam, Dr McHale, had meat always on his table on Friday, and when asked how this was, answered that he didn't know who had gotten dispensations and who hadn't. Edward muttered that he was not to be taken in by such remarks about dispensations; he knew very well I had never troubled to ask for one.

Why should I, since I'm not a Catholic?

If you aren't a Catholic, why don't you become a Protestant?

In the first place, one doesn't become a Protestant, one discovers oneself a Protestant; and it seems to me that an Agnostic has as much right to eat meat on Friday as a Protestant.

Agnosticism isn't a religion. It contains no dogma.

It comes to this, then: that you're going to make me dine off a couple of boiled eggs. And I walked about the room, indignant, but not because I care much about my food—two eggs and a potato are more agreeable to me in intelligent society than grouse would be in stupid. But two eggs and a potato forced down my throat on a theological fork in a Gothic house that had cost twenty thousand pounds to build—two eggs and a potato, without hope of cheese! The Irish do not eat cheese, and I am addicted to it, especially to Double Gloucester. In my school-days that cheese was a wonderful solace in my life, but after leaving school I asked for it in vain, and gave up hope of ever eating it again. It was not till the 'nineties that a waiter mentioned it. Stilton, sir; Chester, Double Gloucester—Double Gloucester! You have Double Gloucester! I thought it extinct. You have it? Then bring it, I cried, and so joyfully that he couldn't drag himself from my sight. An excellent cheese, I told him, but somewhat fallen from the high standard it had assumed in my imagination. Even so, if there had been a slice of Double Gloucester in the larder at Tillyra, I should not have minded the absence of the salmon, and if Edward had pleaded that his servants would be scandalised to see any one who was supposed to be a Catholic eat meat on Fridays, I should have answered: But everybody knows I'm not a Catholic. I've written it in half a dozen books. And if Edward had said: But my servants don't read your books; I shall be obliged if you'll put up with fasting fare for once, I would have eaten an egg and a potato without murmur or remark. But to be told I must dine off two eggs and a potato, so that his conscience should not be troubled during the night, worried me, and I am afraid I cast many an angry look across the table. An apple pie came up and some custards, and these soothed me; he discovered some marmalade in a cupboard, and Edward is such a sociable being when his pipe is alight, that I forgave his theological prejudices for the sake of his aesthetic. We peered into reproductions of Fra Angelico's frescoes, and studied Leonardo's sketches for draperies. Edward liked Ibsen from the beginning, and will like him to the end, and Swift. But he cannot abide Schumann's melodies. We had often talked of these great men and their works, but never did he talk as delightfully as on that Friday evening right on into Saturday morning. Nor was it till Sunday morning that his soul began to trouble him again. As I was finishing breakfast, he had the face to ask me to get ready to go to Mass.

But, Edward, I don't believe in the Mass. My presence will be only—Will you hold your tongue, George?... and not give scandal, he answered, his voice trembling with emotion. Everybody knows that I don't believe in the Mass.

If you aren't a Catholic, why don't you become a Protestant? And he began pushing me from behind. I have told you before that one may become a Catholic, but one discovers oneself a Protestant. But why am I going to Gort? Because you had the bad taste to describe our church in A Drama in Muslin, and to make such remarks about our parish priest that he said, if you showed yourself in Ardrahan again, he'd throw dirty water over you. If you send me to Gort, I shall be able to describe Father ——'s church. Will you not be delaying? One word more, It isn't on account of my description of Father ——'s church that you won't take me to Ardrahan: the real reason is because, at your request, mind you, I asked Father —— not to spit upon your carpet when he came to dinner at Tillyra. You were afraid to ask a priest to refrain from any of his habits, and left the room. I only asked you to draw his attention to the spittoon. Which I did; but he said such things were only a botheration, and my admonitions on the virtue of cleanliness angered him so that he never—

You'll be late for Mass. And you, Whelan; now, are you listening to me? Do you hear me? You aren't to spare the whip. Away you go; you'll only be just in time. And you, Whelan, you're not to delay putting up the horse. Do you hear me?

Whelan drove away rapidly, and when I looked back I saw my friend hurrying across the park, tumbling into the sunk fence in his anxiety not to miss the Confiteor, and Whelan, who saw the accident, too, feared that the masther is after hurting himself. Happily this was not so. Edward was soon on his feet again, running across the field like a hare, the driver said—out of politeness, I suppose.

Hardly like a hare, I said, hoping to draw a more original simile from Whelan's rustic mind; but he only coughed a little, and shook up the reins which he held in a shapeless, freckled hand.

Do you like the parish priest at Gort better than Father —— at Ardrahan?

They're well matched, Whelan answered—a thick-necked, long-bodied fellow with a rim of faded hair showing under a bowler hat that must have been about the stables for years, collecting dust along the corn-bin and getting greasy in the harness-room. One reasoned that it must have been black once upon a time, and that Whelan must have been a young man long ago; and one reasoned that he must have shaved last week, or three weeks ago, for there was a stubble on his chin. But in spite of reason, Whelan seemed like something that had always been, some old rock that had lain among the bramble since the days of Finn MacCoole, and his sullenness seemed as permanent as that of the rocks, and his face, too, seemed like a worn rock, for it was without profile, and I could only catch sight of a great flabby ear and a red, freckled neck, about which was tied a woollen comforter that had once been white.

He answered my questions roughly, without troubling to turn his head, like a man who wishes to be left to himself; and acquiescing in his humour, I fell to thinking of Father James Browne, the parish priest of Carnacun in the 'sixties, and of the day that he came over to Moore Hall in his ragged cassock and battered biretta, with McHale's Irish translation of Homer under his arm, saying that the Archbishop had caught the Homeric ring in many a hexameter. My father smiled at the priest's enthusiasm, but I followed this tall, gaunt man, of picturesque appearance, whose large nose with tufted nostrils I remember to this day, into the Blue Room to ask him if the Irish were better than the Greek. He was a little loth to say it was not, but this rustic scholar did not carry patriotism into literature, and he admitted, on being pressed, that he liked the Greek better, and I listened to his great rotund voice pouring through his wide Irish mouth while he read me some eight or ten lines of Homer, calling my attention to the famous line that echoes the clash of the wave on the beach and the rustle of the shingle as the wave sinks back. My curiosity about McHale's translation interested him in me, and it was arranged soon after between him and my father that he should teach me Latin, and I rode a pony over every morning to a thatched cottage under ilex-trees, where the pleasantest hours of my childhood were spent in a parlour lined with books from floor to ceiling, reading there a little Virgil, and persuading an old priest into talk about Quintilian and Seneca. One day he spoke of Propertius, and the beauty of the name led me to ask Father James if I might read him, and not receiving a satisfactory answer, my curiosity was stimulated and Caesar studied diligently for a month.

Shall I know enough Latin in six months to read Propertius? It will be many years before you will be able to read him. He is a very difficult writer. Could Martin Blake read Propertius?

Martin Blake was Father James's other pupil, and these Blakes are neighbours of ours, and live on the far side of Carnacun. Father James was always telling me of the progress Martin was making in the Latin language, and I was always asking Father James when I should overtake him, but he held out very little hope that it would be possible for me ever to outdo Martin in scholarship. He may have said this because he could not look upon me as a promising pupil, or he may have been moved by a hope to start a spirit of emulation in me. He was a wise man, and the reader will wonder how it was that, with such a natural interest in languages and such excellent opportunities, I did not become a classical scholar; the reader's legitimate curiosity shall be satisfied.

One day Father James said the time would come when I would give up hunting—everything, for the classics, and I rode home, elated, to tell my mother the prophecy. But she burst out laughing, leaving me in no doubt whatever that she looked upon Father James's idea of me as an excellent joke; and the tragedy of it all is that I accepted her casual point of view without consideration, carrying it almost at once into reality, playing truant instead of going to my Latin lesson. Father James, divested of his scholarship, became a mere priest in my eyes. I think that I avoided him, and am sure that I hardly ever saw him again, except at Mass.



Some time afterwards a Blessed Virgin and a St Joseph came down from Dublin, and they were painted and gilded by my father, and so beautifully, that they were the admiration of every one for a very long while, and it was Jim Browne's Crucifixion and these anonymous statues that awakened my first aesthetic emotions. I used to look forward to seeing them all the way from Moore Hall to Carnacun—a bleak road as soon as our gate-lodge was passed: on one side a hill that looked as if it had been peeled; on the other some moist fields, divided by small stone walls, liked by me in those days, for they were excellent practice for my pony. Along this road our tenantry used to come from the villages, the women walking on one side (the married women in dark blue cloaks, the girls hiding their faces behind their shawls, carrying their boots in their hands, which they would put on in the chapel yard), the men walking on the other side, the elderly men in traditional swallow-tail coats, knee-breeches, and worsted stockings; the young men in corduroy trousers and frieze coats. As we passed, the women curtsied in their red petticoats; the young men lifted their round bowler-hats; but the old men stood by, their tall hats in their hands. At the bottom of every one was a red handkerchief, and I remember wisps of grey hair floating in the wind. Our tenantry met the tenantry of Clogher and Tower Hill, and they all collected round the gateway of the chapel to admire the carriages of their landlords. We were received like royalty as we turned in through the gates and went up the wooden staircase leading to the gallery, frequented by the privileged people of the parish—by us, and by our servants, the postmaster and postmistress from Ballyglass, and a few graziers. In the last pew were the police, and after the landlords these were the most respected.

As soon as we were settled in our pew the acolytes ventured from the sacristy tinkling their bells, the priest following, carrying the chalice covered with the veil. As the ceremony of the Mass had never caught my fancy, I used to spend my time looking over the pew into the body of the church, wondering at the herd of peasantry, trying to distinguish our own serfs among those from the Tower Hill and Clogher estates. Pat Plunket, a highly respectable tenant (he owned a small orchard), I could always discover; he knelt just under us, and in front of a bench, the only one in the body of the church, and about him collected those few that had begun to rise out of brutal indigence. Their dress and their food were slightly different from the commoner kind. Pat Plunket and Mickey Murphy, the carpenter, not the sawyer, were supposed to drink tea and eat hot cakes. The others breakfasted off Indian-meal porridge. And to Pat Plunket's bench used to come a tall woman, whose grace of body the long blue-black cloak of married life could not hide. I liked to wonder which among the men about her might be her husband. And a partial memory still lingers of a cripple that was allowed to avail himself of Pat Plunket's bench. His crutches were placed against the wall, and used to catch my eye, suggesting thoughts of what his embarrassment would be if they were taken away whilst he prayed. A great unknown horde of peasantry from Ballyglass and beyond it knelt in the left-hand corner, and after the Communion they came up the church with a great clatter of brogues to hear the sermon, leaving behind a hideous dwarf whom I could not take my eyes off, so strange was his waddle as he moved about the edge of the crowd, his huge mouth grinning all the time.

Our pew was the first on the right-hand side, and the pew behind us was the Clogher pew, and it was filled with girls—Helena, Livy, Lizzy, and May—the first girls I ever knew; and these are now under the sod—all except poor Livy, an old woman whom I sometimes meet out with her dog by the canal. In the first few on the left was a red landlord with a frizzled beard and a perfectly handsome wife, and behind him was Joe McDonnel from Carnacun House, a great farmer, and the wonder of the church, so great was his belly. I can see these people dimly, like figures in the background of a picture; but the blind girl is as clear in my memory as if she were present. She used to kneel behind the Virgin's altar and the Communion rails, almost entirely hidden under an old shawl, grown green with age; and the event of every Sunday, at least for me, was to see her draw herself forward when the Communion bell rang, and lift herself to receive the wafer that the priest placed upon her tongue and having received it, she would sink back, overcome, overawed, and I used to wonder at her piety, and think of the long hours she spent sitting by the cabin fire waiting for Sunday to come round again. On what roadside was that cabin? And did she come, led by some relative or friend, or finding her way down the road by herself? Questions that interested me more than anybody else, and it was only at the end of a long inquiry that I learnt that she came from one of the cabins opposite Carnacun House. Every time we passed that cabin I used to look out for her, thinking how I might catch sight of her in the doorway; but I never saw her except in the chapel. Only once did we meet her as we drove to Ballyglass, groping her way, doubtless, to Carnacun. Where else would she be going? And hearing our horses' hoofs she sank closer to the wall, overawed, into the wet among the falling leaves.

As soon as the Communion was over Father James would come forward, and thrusting his hands under the alb (his favourite gesture) he would begin his sermon in Irish (in those days Irish was the language of the country among the peasantry), and we would sit for half an hour, wondering what were the terrible things he was saying, asking ourselves if it were pitchforks or ovens, or both, that he was talking; for the peasantry were groaning aloud, the women not infrequently falling on their knees, beating their breasts; and I remember being perplexed by the possibility that some few tenantry might be saved, for if that happened how should we meet them in heaven? Would they look another way and pass us by without lifting their hats and crying: Long life to yer honour?

My memories of Carnacun Chapel and Father James Browne were interrupted by a sudden lurching forward of the car, which nearly flung me into the road. Whelan apologised for himself and his horse, but I damned him, for I was annoyed at being awakened from my dream. There was no hope of being able to pick it up again, for the chapel bell was pealing down the empty landscape, calling the peasants from their desolute villages. It seemed to me that the Carnacun bell used to cry across the moist fields more cheerfully; there was a menace in the Gort bell as there is in the voice of a man who fears that he may not be obeyed, and this gave me an interest in the Mass I was going to hear. It would teach me something of the changes that had happened during my absence. The first thing I noticed as I approached the chapel was the smallness of the crowd of men about the gateposts; only a few figures, and they surly and suspicious fellows, resolved not to salute the landlord, yet breaking away with difficulty from traditional servility. Our popularity had disappeared with the laws that favoured us, but Whelan's appearance counted for something in the decaying sense of rank among the peasantry, and I mentally reproached Edward for not putting his servant into livery. It interested me to see that the superstitions of Carnacun were still followed: the peasants dipped their fingers in a font and sprinkled themselves, and the only difference that I noticed between the two chapels was one for the worse; the windows at Gort were not broken, and the happy, circling swallows did not build under the rafters. It was easier to discover differences in the two congregations. My eyes sought vainly the long dark cloak of married life, nor did I succeed in finding an old man in knee-breeches and worsted stockings, nor a girl drawing her shawl over her head.

The Irish language is inseparable from these things, I said, and it has gone. The sermon will be in English, or in a language as near English as those hats and feathers are near the fashions that prevail in Paris.

The Gort peasants seemed able to read, for they held prayer-books, and as if to help them in their devotion a harmonium began to utter sounds as discordant as the red and blue glass in the windows, and all the time the Mass continued very much as I remembered it, until the priest lifted his alb over his head and placed it upon the altar (Father James used to preach in the vestment, I said to myself); and very slowly and methodically the Gort priest tried to explain the mystery of Transubstantiation to the peasants, who lent such an indifferent ear to him that it was difficult not to think that Father James's sermons, based on the fear of the devil, were more suitable to Ireland.

A Mass only rememberable for a squealing harmonium, some panes in terrifying blues and reds, and my own great shame. However noble my motive may have been, I had knelt and stood with the congregation; I had even bowed my head, making believe by this parade that I accepted the Mass as a truth. It could not be right to do this, even for the sake of the Irish Literary Theatre, and I left the chapel asking myself by what strange alienation of the brain had Edward come to imagine that a piece of enforced hypocrisy on my part could be to any one's advantage.

It seemed to me that mortal sin had been committed that morning; a sense of guilt clung about me. Edward was consulted. Could it be right for one who did not believe in the Mass to attend Mass? He seemed to acquiesce that it might not be right, but when Sunday came round again my refusal to get on the car so frightened him that I relinquished myself to his scruples, to his terror, to his cries. The reader will judge me weak, but it should be remembered that he is my oldest friend, and it seemed to me that we should never be the same friends again if I refused; added to which he had been telling me all the week that he was getting on finely with his third act, and for the sake of a hypothetical act I climbed up on the car.



Must we wait for Benediction? I cried ironically.

Edward did not answer, possibly because he does not regard Benediction as part of the liturgy, and is, therefore, more or less indifferent to it. The horse trotted and Whelan clacked his tongue, a horrible noise from which I tried to escape by asking him questions.

Are the people quiet in this part of the country? Quite enough, he answered, and I thought I detected a slightly contemptuous accent in the syllables.

Not much life in the country? I hear the hunting is going to be stopped?

Parnell never told them to stop the hunting.

You're a Parnellite?

He was a great man.

The priests went against him, I said, because he loved another man's wife.

And O'Shea not living with her at the time.

Even if he had been, I answered, Ireland first of all, say I. He was a great man.

He was that.

And the priest at Gort—was he against him?

Wasn't he every bit as bad as the others?

Then you don't care to go to his church?

I'd just as lief stop away.

It's strange, Whelan; it's strange that Mr Martyn should insist on my going to Gort to Mass. Of what use can Mass be to any one if he doesn't wish to hear it?

Whelan chuckled, or seemed to chuckle.

He will express no opinion, I said to myself, and abstractions don't interest him. So, turning to the concrete, I spoke of the priest who was to say Mass, and Whelan agreed that he had gone agin Parnell.

Well, Whelan, it's a great waste of time going to Gort to hear a Mass one doesn't want to hear, and I have business with Mr Yeats.

Maybe you'd like me to turn into Coole, sur?

I was thinking we might do that ... only you won't speak to Mr Martin about it, will you? Because, you see Whelan, every one has his prejudices, and I am a great friend of Mr Martyn, and wouldn't like to disappoint him.

Wouldn't like to contrairy him, sur?

That's it, Whelan. Now, what about your dinner? You don't mind having your dinner in a Protestant house?



The dinner is the main point, isn't it, Whelan?

Begad it is sur, and he turned the horse in through the gates.

Just go round, I said, and put the horse up and say nothing to anybody.

Yes, sur.

After long ringing the maid-servant opened the door and told me that Lady Gregory had gone to church with her niece; Mr Yeats was composing. Would I take a seat in the drawing-room and wait till he was finished? He must have heard the wheels of the car coming round the gravel sweep, for he was in the room before the servant left it—enthusiastic, though a little weary. He had written five lines and a half, and a pause between one's rhymes is an excellent thing, he said. One could not but admire him, for even in early morning he was convinced of the importance of literature in our national life. He is nearly as tall as a Dublin policeman, and preaching literature he stood on the hearthrug, his feet set close together. Lifting his arms above his head (the very movement that Raphael gives to Paul when preaching at Athens), he said what he wanted to do was to gather up a great mass of speech. It did not seem to me clear why he should be at pains to gather up a great mass of speech to write so exiguous a thing as The Shadowy Waters; but we live in our desires rather than in our achievements, and Yeats talked on, telling me that he was experimenting, and did not know whether his play would come out in rhyme or in blank verse; he was experimenting. He could write blank verse almost as easily as prose, and therefore feared it; some obstacle, some darn was necessary. It seemed a pity to interrupt him, but I was interested to hear if he were going to accept my end, and allow the lady to drift southward, drinking yellow ale with the sailors, while the hero sought salvation alone in the North. He flowed out into a torrent of argument and explanation, very ingenious, but impossible to follow. Phrase after phrase rose and turned and went out like a wreath of smoke, and when the last was spoken and the idea it had borne had vanished, I asked him if he knew the legend of Diarmuid and Grania. He began to tell it to me in its many variants, surprising me with unexpected dramatic situations, at first sight contradictory and incoherent, but on closer scrutiny revealing a psychology in germ which it would interest me to unfold. A wonderful hour of literature that was, flowering into a resolution to write an heroic play together. As we sat looking at each other in silence, Lady Gregory returned from church.

She came into the room quickly, with a welcoming smile on her face, and I set her down here as I see her: a middle-aged woman, agreeable to look upon, perhaps for her broad, handsome, intellectual brow enframed in iron-grey hair. The brown, wide-open eyes are often lifted in looks of appeal and inquiry, and a natural wish to sympathise softens her voice till it whines. It modulated, however, very pleasantly as she yielded her attention to Yeats, who insisted on telling her how two beings so different as myself and Whelan had suddenly become united in a conspiracy to deceive Edward, Whelan because he could not believe in the efficacy of a Mass performed by an anti-Parnellite, and I because—Yeats hesitated for a sufficient reason, deciding suddenly that I had objected to hear Mass in Gort because there was no one in the church who had read Villiers de l'Isle Adam except myself; and he seemed so much amused that the thought suddenly crossed my mind that perhaps the cocasseries of Connaught were more natural to him than the heroic moods which he believed himself called upon to interpret. His literature is one thing and his conversation is another, divided irreparably. Is this right? Lady Gregory chattered on, telling stories faintly farcical, amusing to those who knew the neighbourhood, but rather wearisome for one who didn't, and I was waiting for an opportunity to tell her that an heroic drama was going to be written on the subject of Diarmuid and Grania.

When my lips broke the news, a cloud gathered in her eyes, and she admitted that she thought it would be hardly wise for Yeats to undertake any further work at present; and later in the afternoon she took me into her confidence, telling me that Yeats came to Coole every summer because it was necessary to get him away from the distractions of London, not so much from social as from the intellectual distractions that Arthur Symons had inaugurated. The Savoy rose up in my mind with its translations from Villiers le l'Isle Adam, Verlaine and Maeterlinck; and I agreed with her that alien influences were a great danger to the artist. All Yeats's early poems, she broke in, were written in Sligo, and among them were twenty beautiful lyrics and Ireland's one great poem, The Wanderings of Usheen—all these had come straight out of the landscape and the people he had known from boyhood.

For seven years we have been waiting for a new book from him; ever since The Countess Cathleen we have been reading the publisher's autumn announcement of The Wind among the Reeds. The volume was finished here last year; it would never have been finished if I had not asked him to Coole; and though we live in an ungrateful world, I think somebody will throw a kind word after me some day, if for nothing else, for The Wind among the Reeds.

I looked round, thinking that perhaps life at Coole was arranged primarily to give him an opportunity of writing poems. As if she had read my thoughts, Lady Gregory led me into the back drawing-room, and showed me the table at which he wrote, and I admired the clean pens, the fresh ink, and the spotless blotter; these were her special care every morning. I foresaw the strait sofa lying across the window, valued in some future time because the poet had reclined upon it between his rhymes. Ah me! the creeper that rustles an accompaniment to his melodies in the pane will awaken again, year after year, but one year it will awaken in vain.... My eyes thanked Lady Gregory for her devotion to literature. Instead of writing novels she had released the poet from the quern of daily journalism, and anxious that she should understand my appreciation of her, I spoke of the thirty-six wild swans that had risen out of the lake while Yeats and I wandered all through the long evening seeking a new composition for The Shadowy Waters.

She did not answer me, and I followed her in silence back to the front room and sat listening to her while she told me that it was because she wanted poems from him that she looked askance at our project to write a play together on the subject of Diarmuid and Grania. It was not that the subject was unsuited to his genius, but she thought it should be written by him alone; the best of neither would transpire in collaboration, and she lamented that it were useless to save him from the intellectual temptations of Symons if he were to be tossed into more subtle ones. She laughed, as is her way when she cozens, and reminded me that we were of different temperaments and had arisen out of different literary traditions.

Mayo went to Montmartre, and Sligo turned into Fleet Street.

Suspicious in her cleverness, my remark did not altogether please her, and she said something about a man of genius and a man of talent coming together, speaking quickly under her breath, so that her scratch would escape notice at the time; and we were talking of our responsibilities towards genius when the door opened and Yeats came into the room.

He entered somewhat diffidently, I thought, with an invitation to me to go for a walk. Lady Gregory was appeased with the news that he had written five and a half lines that morning, and a promise that he would be back at six, and would do a little more writing before dinner. As he went away he told me that he might attain his maximum of nine lines that evening, if he succeeded in finishing the broken line. But S must never meet S; for his sake was inadmissible, and while seeking how he might avoid such a terrifying cacophony we tramped down wet roads and climbed over low walls into scant fields, finding the ruined castle we were in search of at the end of a long boreen among tall, wet grasses. The walls were intact and the stair, and from the top we stood watching the mist drifting across the grey country. Yeats telling how the wine had been drugged at Tara, myself thinking how natural it was that Lady Gregory should look upon me as a danger to Yeats's genius. As we descended the slippery stair an argument began in my head whereby our project of collaboration might be defended. Next time I went to Coole I would say to Lady Gregory: You see, Yeats came to me with The Shadowy Waters because he had entangled the plot and introduced all his ideas into it, and you will admit that the plot had to be disentangled? To conciliate her completely I would say that while Yeats was rewriting The Shadowy Waters I would spend my time writing an act about the many adventures that befell Diarmuid and Grania as they fled before Finn. Yeats had told me these adventures in the ruined castle; I had given to them all the attention that I could spare from Lady Gregory, who, I was thinking, might admit my help in the arrangement of some incidents in The Shadowy Waters, but would always regard our collaboration in Diarmuid and Grania with hostility. But for this partiality it seemed to me I could not blame her, so well had she put her case when she said that her fear was that my influence might break up the mould of his mind.

The car waited for me at the end of the boreen, and before starting I tried to persuade Yeats to come to Tillyra with me, but he said he could not leave Lady Gregory alone, and before we parted I learnt that she read to him every evening. Last summer it was War and Peace, and this summer she was reading Spenser's Faerie Queene, for he was going to publish a selection and must get back to Coole for the seventh canto.

Goodbye, and springing up on the car, I was driven by Whelan into the mist, thinking Yeats the most fortunate amongst us, he having discovered among all others that one who, by instinctive sympathy, understood the capacity of his mind, and could evoke it, and who never wearied of it, whether it came to her in elaborately wrought stanzas or in the form of some simple confession, the mood of last night related as they crossed the sward after breakfast. As the moon is more interested in the earth than in any other thing, there is always some woman more interested in a man's mind than in anything else, and willing to follow it sentence by sentence. A great deal of Yeats's work must come to her in fragments—a line and a half, two lines—and these she faithfully copies on her typewriter, and even those that his ultimate taste has rejected are treasured up, and perhaps will one day appear in a stately variorum edition.

Well she may say that the future will owe her something, and my thoughts moved back to the first time I saw her some twenty-five years ago. She was then a young woman, very earnest, who divided her hair in the middle and wore it smooth on either side of a broad and handsome brow. Her eyes were always full of questions, and her Protestant high-school air became her greatly and estranged me from her.

In her drawing-room were to be met men of assured reputation in literature and politics, and there was always the best reading of the time upon her tables. There was nothing, however, in her conversation to suggest literary faculty, and it was a surprise to me to hear one day that she had written a pamphlet in defence of Arabi Pasha, an Egyptian rebel. Some years after she edited her husband's memoirs, circumstances had not proved favourable to the development of her gift, and it languished till she met Yeats. He could not have been long at Coole before he began to draw her attention to the beauty of the literature that rises among the hills and bubbles irresponsibly, and set her going from cabin to cabin taking down stories, and encouraged her to learn the original language of the country, so that they might add to the Irish idiom which the peasant had already translated in English, making in this way a language for themselves.

Yeats could only acquire the idiom by the help of Lady Gregory, for although he loves the dialect and detests the defaced idiom which we speak in our streets and parlours, he has little aptitude to learn that of the boreen and the market-place. She put her aptitude at his service, and translated portions of Cathleen ni Houlihan into Kiltartan (Kiltartan is the village in which she collects the dialect); and she worked it into the revised version of the stories from The Secret Rose, published by the Dun Emer Press, and thinking how happy their lives must be at Coole, implicated in literary partnership, my heart went out towards her in a sudden sympathy. She has been wise all her life through, I said; she knew him to be her need at once, and she never hesitated ... yet she knew me before she knew him.