Since the day I walked into my garden saying: Highly favoured am I among authors, my belief had never faltered that I was an instrument in the hands of the Gods. But the chosen of the Gods are always given the needful means for the accomplishment of the Gods' mighty purposes, and for many months I had stood perplexed, but never doubting. I had striven to fashion a story, and then a play, but the artist in me could not be suborned. Davitt came with a project for a newspaper, but he died; and I had begun to lose patience, to lose spirit, and to mutter, I am without hands to smite, and suchlike, until one day on coming in from the garden, the form which the book should take was revealed to me. But an autobiography, I said, is an unusual form for a sacred book. But is it? My doubts quenched a moment after in a memory of Paul, and the next day the dictation of the rough outline from the Temple to Moore Hall was begun, and from that outline, decided upon in a week of inspiration, I have never strayed. I had not been to Moore Hall for many years, and loath to go there had often said to Miss Gough: Why should I go to Moore Hall? for it is all mirrored in memory; all the beautiful curves of the bay are before me, along Kiltoome and Connor Island.

But if the lake hasn't changed, the country has, and you'll bring back many new impressions and moods.

You may be right. The gentry have gone and the big houses are in ruins, or empty or sold to nuns and monks, who are the only people who can afford to live in fine houses. Ballinafad is now a monastery. You'll see Ballinafad. I know it as well as Moore Hall. But you haven't seen it as a monastery?

You may be right. I'll go. Nature is full of surprises. Prolific mother of detail, I'll go to thee.

Ballinafad lies away to the left between Balla and Manulla, and on stepping out of the train I said: To take in Ballinafad would mean a round of four or five miles. I will instead drive over from Moore Hall. But where is the Colonel's gig? and overtaking the porter I laid hand on his shoulder and he told me that if the Colonel's gig did not arrive soon, my best chance of getting a car would be in the village. He promised that as soon as his work was finished he would go down and inquire, but he was afraid Johnnie MacCormac had gone to Westport, and if Johnnie wasn't at home the only thing to do would be to telegraph for a car to Balla. And Balla being seven miles away, I should have to wait an hour and a half at Manulla Junction, watching grey sky and bridge, listening to the plaint of telegraph wires. The porter said he thought he heard a yoke coming up the road. He'll cross the bridge over beyant; and the bridge became at once the object of interest to me. It's his yoke right enough. You'll be off now in no time; and these words were spoken in a tone that convinced me the man was conscious of his melancholy lot. But I couldn't stop at Manulla to keep him company; as soon as I left he would be as lonely as before; and the Colonel's groom being anxious to excuse himself for being late told me [he] had gone to Derrinanny to sleep with his wife overnight.

I wonder where the station-master and the porters live?

Are you after leaving anything behind you, sir?

No, I was merely wondering what they do when not at work at the station. There are only two trains in the day. The boy thought there were three, but he would be able to find out at the grocer's. So there is a shop in Manulla?

We'll be passing it in a minute, sir; we're just going into the village now.

Nobody was about; we saw neither cat, nor dog, nor pig in the muddy street; the groom mentioned, however, that the Colonel knew the priest, and as soon as we passed his chapel the fields began again, uneventful little fields, for there was neither tree nor brook to be seen, nor any one at work in them. Great stones had rolled down from the walls into the boreens leading from the main road up a landscape that it would be flattering to call hilly; it was merely a little tumbled. Over the hillside a cabin showed sometimes, and at last a dog bounded out of one, and I said:

Where there's a dog there's a man, and where there's a man a woman isn't far off—isn't that so?

The boy did not answer, and, as seemingly he could not be persuaded into talk of any interest, I continued my survey of the country, noticing, for lack of something else to do, that it had flattened out without becoming a plain, and that the clouds were gathering on the horizon in a mass foretelling a downpour. But to mention that we were in for a wetting would only provoke a monosyllable from the boy. On the whole, the better chance of conversation seemed to be in a comparison between the Manulla and the Balla Road.

The Colonel thinks this is the easier road.

It doesn't seem to be quite so hilly, but it is treeless, whereas on the Balla road there are trees nearly all the way to Moore Hall. Ballinafad—by the way, Mr Llewellyn Blake has settled the monks at Ballinafad, hasn't he?

So I've heard tell, sir.

And how do the country people like that, and they going to get the estate divided between them?

The boy called to the pony, and I had to repeat the question.

The monks is giving fine wages at Ballinafad.

But how much they were paying he could not tell, and I tried to forget his presence, remembering that on the road out of Balla we leave Athy Valley on the right, and I took pleasure in recalling Sir Robert Blosse and Lady Harriet; their children I never knew. A little farther on was Browne Hall; Edith and Alice were beautiful girls. The Browne Hall and the Ballinafad estates were contiguous, and Joe Blake going off to Castlebar races with his arms round his serving-maid's waist rose up in my mind as if it had been yesterday. And two miles farther up the road is Ballyglass, our post town; the mail coach used to change horses there, and I remembered my mother reining in her ponies so that we might have a good view of the coach as it came swinging round the bend. The men that clipped horses lived in Ballyglass, in a cottage with a pretty flower garden in front—a rare thing in Mayo; and from the gate of Tower Hill to Carnacun the road is wooded, between Carnacun and Moore Hall the hills are naked, and the Annys River dribbles through the low-lying fields under Annys Bridge to Lough Carra.

We shall turn into the Castlebar road presently, shan't we?

Yes, sir, round by Clogher.



The lamb is the first sign of spring. The lamb comes before the daffodil. Do you know the flower?

Do you mean the daffydowndilly, sir?

That's what old Betty MacDonald used to call them.

We're just turning into the Clogher road, sir.

Yes, and yonder is the police-station, and beyond is the cross-road—to the right Castlebar, to the left Carnacun.

You've a fine memory, God bless it, yer honour.

The whitewash of the Clogher police barracks struck through the trees the same as forty years before, and I began to wonder what answer the boy would make if I were to tell him that the trees had not grown a foot within forty years. I suppose the police are always after the girls now as they were in my time? and the boy answered me: Them fellows do be too busy oiling their quiffs to put the comether on the girls.

As soon as we pass the barracks, I said, we shall turn to the left and there will be hazel-bushes and rocks on both sides of the road, and about two hundred yards farther on we shall get a blink of Carnacun Lake where the hill drops. But the groom was not listening, and I fell to thinking of the pretty brooks one sees in England, purling and curling between low green banks, and shadowed by willow-trees. The willow follows the brook, and the Irish landscape lacks brooks and willows. Lakes are not in my temperament, I said; and set myself to remembering the many different lakes that we catch sight of from our roads; and then my thoughts were whisked away to Domnick Browne, who went to New Zealand, taking with him a bundle of hazel rods for walking-sticks, forty years ago, and did not write to me till he discovered that he could trace me no further back than Charles V, but himself went back to Charlemagne. A wonderful thing life is, I said, and began to notice the endless stone walls between Moore Hall and Manulla, loose walls dividing little fields with a hawthorn growing in one corner and two magpies flying—whither? The people and the country are still savage, I mused, and Ireland is without pleasant objects to look upon, though why there have never been windmills in Ireland it would be difficult to say, for there is plenty of wind. In my childhood there were a few water-mills, and it was pleasing to recall the day when the governess and the Colonel and myself had tripped over to Tower Hill to watch the mill-wheel. But long ago that mill stopped working. Yonder is Carnacun Lake, behind a scrubby hillside with the pines foment it, as the groom would say if he could be persuaded into speech. The lake seemed smaller than I remembered it, but he could not tell me if it were drying up. I looked forward to the crossroads, and it was pleasant to see that the smith's forge was still there, and Grayon's house, one of my tenants, the tenant of Ballintubber, a wealthy man, even forty years ago, for he could afford to lend me two hundred pounds ... money spent during my minority. The chapel stood up over the village on a knoll, and the fringe of trees about it was as ragged as when our carriage used to turn in the gateway. The smith's house and three or four cabins with sagging roofs were still the village of Carnacun; nothing had been added or taken away, and I looked out for the house licensed to sell beer and tobacco. It was there, as dark and as dismal as of yore, a threshold that any moralist would approve, and above it was the great wall of the ball alley denounced by Father James Browne in his sermons: You think I don't be hearing your brogues about the doorways, and after I have gone up the steps to the altar, he used to say. And now the rival of his Mass had fallen into ruins, some of the cut stone had tumbled out of the high wall, weeds had sprung up in the alley, and Father James's house, to which I liked to ride my pony for a Latin lesson, was a ruin too. The present priest lives higher up the hill, in a two-storeyed house with plate-glass windows; but does he read Virgil for his pleasure and drink as good port as Father James? Be this as it may, it will always seem to me that a great deal of the character of the village of Carnacun has gone with the old cottage under the ilex-trees, the ball alley, and Father James Browne. His image has nearly faded from my mind, but I can still recall a high-shouldered man with a large hooked nose and a complexion like a Crofton apple, whose wont it was to walk about the parish in a torn cassock seeing that everybody was about his business. He would hop over the wall down into the road and out of the road again, on to the path across the triangular field to the school-house over yonder on the hillside. Why, Misther School-masther, do you mind being called the school-masther? You are the school-masther just as I am the parish priesht. I don't mind being called the parish priesht. I like being called the parish priesht, so why should you not like being called the school-masther? So class distinctions were beginning to jar even then, I said. And to this school we owe the disappearance of the Irish language from this part of the country. I remembered the children returning from this school along a road that winds through damp fields on one side, melting almost into bog about the Annys River; on the other side the land rises, and all the cabins appeared just as I had left them; a little improvement was noticeable in the last one; a sty it used to be in old time, amid cesspools, unfit truly for an animal to live in. My hope often was that no human being would come out of its doorway until we had passed it by, and I recalled the satisfaction with which I learnt one day that this cabin was not on our but on the Tower Hill property. I anticipated the elder-bushes a few yards farther on, and could still see my mother and my governess in my thoughts gathering elder flowers for they were supposed to be good for sunburn, and myself cutting elder stems to make pop-guns. A path leads over the hill to the right, and down to the left a boreen runs along one of our woods, to Runnineal, a Tower Hill village by the Annys River, and the house under the pines where the main road strikes through is a wood-ranger's lodge, the dwelling of a man called Murphy, whose welcome I used to dread; for, like a great big dog, he would run out of his house or saw-pit when he heard the wheels of the car, and his bark of welcome followed us until we reached the little bridge that spans the bog drain. In those days a path was a wonderful thing, much more wonderful than a road, and there was an enticing little path by the bridge-head. My governess forbade it; but one day I succeeded in persuading her to wander down it, and we had followed it through some young fir-trees; and yet undaunted I had implored that we should follow the path through a wood, and it had led us at last to a field golden with buttercups and a drain in which wild irises grew. A little farther on we spied another path leading up the hillside, a dark and suspicious path, but a girl who dropped a curtsy told us that it would lead us right on to the stables of the Big House. We had dared to follow it too; and had come upon dells, open spaces, and copses, and trees of every kind; silver firs in whose vasty heights I was certain there were wood-pigeons' nests; and as we descended the hill on the other side a rowan delayed us; the berries were just beginning to redden, and immediately after we were in the bog road which was well known to us, and at the end of our adventure. Red Rowan berries and blue irises are not of the same month; two memories seem to have got mingled. No matter, this wooded hillside was once full of adventure and mystery, and there was a dark place under the turret at the end of the garden into which I did not dare to go, bramble-covered hollows into which I used to peep and then run away, afraid to look back. But the day came when I pushed my way through the dark coverts, and lo! there was nothing. Suddenly the pony stopped, and whilst the driver opened the gates I admired the fine ironwork and the cut-stone pillars topped with round balls that the Colonel had brought from Newbrook, and it looked handsomer even than I had expected, though the Colonel's praise had led me to expect a good deal. It had opened upon one of the Newbrook avenues a hundred years ago; cut stone was not so costly then as it is today; even so, money must have been more plentiful in those days, for the gateway obviously represented a great deal of labour. In those times everything came off the land: mutton, beer, butter, bread, jam; the stewards, gardeners, butlers, and huntsmen came from the village, the housemaids too, for feudalism had lasted in Ireland down to 1870. But the peasants have come into possession of the lands from which they were evicted, and are now felling the trees of the beautifully timbered parks—trees two hundred years old are being sold at eighteen-pence apiece at Newbrook. And the trees that I am now looking at—the Moore Hall trees—will soon after my death be felled, the gateway will be offered for sale again, and the cut stone will find its way into cottage walls.

The pony stopped in front of the high pitch in the road, jerking me forward in my seat, and began the laborious ascent whilst I looked out for the tall laburnum up whose slippery stem I had never succeeded in swarming. It was among the gone; some hawthorn-bushes I missed too, and very little was left of the great lilac-bush that marked another path to the stables. We had looked forward to seeing it when we walked out with our governess, and I remembered how one day in midsummer, after chasing through the woods, playing at Red Indians, yelling as we imagined Red Indians yell on the war-path, I had thrown myself into a haycock just by this lilac-bush, and planned the morrow: we would bring out whips with louder lashes and extend our adventure into mysterious places whither we had never dared to venture. But the next day the woods had lost some of their mystery. When summer returned the ghouls and fairies had died out of my imagination, and finding that I no longer experienced any desire to crack my whip, or to hide in the lilac-bush, or to roll in the hay, I went to old Joseph to ask him how this was. He answered I had grown older.... The drive turned round a hawthorn, passed through a glade, and I looked out for the next lilac-bush, for it was within its perfume that I had had my first religious conversation with the Colonel. It, too, was among the gone, but on the left, on the brow of the lawn, were two holly-trees into which I had shot many an arrow from the steps. But the laburnums that had once decorated the head of the drive, had they died too, died of old age or for lack of human companionship, the laburnum being a familiar tree?







Cover in the yard! I said.

Why not? A series of arches and a terrace on the top.

And a flight of steps would serve from the higher to the lower terrace.

And on either hand vases—

Or rare pieces of sculpture, I said. The Colonel looked distressed. But how would the yard underneath be lighted?

By side windows.

And the drip? The rain would have to go somewhere. On our way to the bathroom he explained how the drip might be mitigated. Here, he said, is the bathroom, and I answered: 'Tis well; but the great eighteenth century knew not bathrooms, and we talked of the footpans and the bidets that once formed part of the furniture of every bedroom, and the disrepute into which bathing had fallen since Roman times, all through the Middle Ages, until Anglo-Indians reintroduced the habit of the thorough washing of the body into Europe. From the bathroom window we caught sight of the ruined privy under the beech-trees to which our ancestors were wont to adjourn in the morning, their pipes in their mouths, to talk the news, and the news was always of a race-horse, or a duel, or a hunt. We have improved upon those times, yet our neighbours still allow their dogs to deposit ordure upon our doorsteps in London. And whilst I meditated on humanity's slow advancement, the Colonel told me that he had chosen my father's dressing-room for the bathroom. I never should have had the courage to make the change, so real is my memory of the room as it stood in my father's lifetime, himself seated at the great bureau full of countless drawers at which he wrote his letters, or standing before the toilet-table between the windows covered with cut-glass phials of macassar oil, pots of bear's grease, many kinds of ivory brushes, tortoiseshell combs of all sorts and sizes, some destined for the hair of the head, some for the whiskers, relics of the days of his dandyhood, for he must have been a great dandy when Anonymous turned a shoe at Liverpool and Corunna won the Chester Cup.

He liked me to come into his dressing-room to talk to him while he lathered his face, and I remembered the lie I told him when he asked me if I had used the top of his silver shaving-pot to knock in a nail, and his alarm when I stumbled over the long s's in grandfather's edition of Burke's speeches. I have forgotten his reproofs to me, but can still see him in my thoughts opening the green-baize door, and can almost hear him communicating the direful tidings to my mother. As she showed little or no alarm the governess was sent for and it was put to them: Had they ever known or heard of a child of seven who could not read Burke's speeches without faltering in an edition printed with the long s's? Before Miss Westby had time to answer, my mother said that she didn't believe that any child of seven could read the long s's without faltering, and I can recall his long mouth speaking through the latter, telling that when he was three he used to read the Times aloud to his mother at breakfast. My mother's incredulity exasperated him; he ordered my governess and me to the schoolroom, and for days we sat reading a very indifferent history of England by one Lingard. We listened with apprehension while Joseph Applely brushed the master's silk hats and arranged his gloves for him in the hall, and we breathed more freely when we heard the hall door clang, for we knew then he had gone to the stables to run his fingers down the horses' forelegs, and our hope was that his interest in the morning gallops would help him to forget my lessons. We passed the door of the room to which my mother had taken me to pray by the death-bed. It had not been in use since mother's death. The Colonel was with her; he had probably seen her die, and I supposed that that was why he had chosen for himself the two rooms at the end of the passage—rooms that I recollected as grandmother's rooms; and after visiting them he threw open the door of the summer room, a pretty room opening on to the balcony that the four great pillars support, and in an instant the room returned to what it had been forty years before, my father sitting at the rosewood table in the evening, drinking a large cup of tea, telling me stories of Egypt and the Dead Sea, Baghdad, the Euphrates and the Ganges, stories of monkeys and alligators and hippopotami, stories that a boy loves. We left the room to go to the rooms that were once grandfather's library. The Colonel had turned them into bedrooms. Grandfather's spirit seems still to animate these rooms, I said. The Colonel did not answer, and then I seemed to apprehend something that had hitherto escaped me: Moore Hall had always seemed alien and remote to me because it was pervaded by the minds of those that preceded me. My grandfathers and grandmothers were underground, but along the landings and in the large rooms opening on the passages I seemed to be aware of mentalities different from my own. Nor is it strange that this should be so, Moore Hall not having been subjected to any new influences after 1870; and going down to luncheon with my brother I felt I should never be able to live in this house; I should always feel my grandfather sitting by me wondering how it was that his grandson should practise so familiar a style, one so unlike Gibbon.

I should always be engaged in imaginary dialogues, I said, telling him he did not always write like Gibbon but like me in his preface to the French Revolution, and that the preface is the best part of it. If you were to say that, said the Colonel, he would answer, But you haven't read my history of the French Revolution. I asked myself if the Colonel intended a reproach. After luncheon, he proposed to show me the garden, but I could barely see it, so clear was my memory of the old eighteenth-century garden with its rows of espalier apple-trees and four great walnut-trees, one in each plot. The two great ilex-trees whose branches leaned in front of the turret were gone; the turret was in ruins, and the Colonel had felled a good many beeches along the twenty-foot wall to get light and air for his fruit-trees. I was sorry for these.

But nothing grows under them, he explained, and led me round his peach and pear and apple and cherry-trees, and while he explained the different varieties, I dreamed of the sweet-briar hedge that divided my mother's flower-garden from the plots in which we had once grown potatoes, cabbages, onions, spinach, chives, parsnips, cauliflowers, beans, asparagus. The asparagus-bed was never a great success, because of the walnut-trees which my father would not allow to be felled, his mother having planted them. Even more distinct in my memory than these trees was a great apple-tree—a very venerable tree, moss-grown and carious. It stood up a little beyond the flower-walk, and near it, tucked away in a corner, was a dense growth of raspberry-bushes enclosed by a thick hedge, a dangerous place in my imagination, one in which witches and other evil spirits were to be met, but the fruit tempted me, and my governess once boxed my ears for having hidden myself among the raspberries. And then we came upon the ruins of the greenhouse from which we used to steal the grapes, even when the door was kept locked, and my father once beat me with a horse-whip for breaking the panes, and now, elderly men both of us, the Colonel and I stood looking at a large cut-stone chimney that the Colonel had saved in case I should care to rebuild the greenhouse again. Cut stone is very expensive, he said, but in our grandfathers' days labour was cheaper; and we passed into the stables, none of which had fallen. There was the box in which Croagh Patrick neighed when the boy brought his sieveful of corn. How he plunged his muzzle into it! for he was a greedy feeder and ready to kick any one that came near him till the last grain was licked up. In the next box I had seen Master George, one of the best horses of his year, only a few pounds behind Croagh Patrick at a mile and a half, and his superior at two miles, a terrible buck-jumper that would have dislodged any cowboy. The little ponies that these horsemen ride have not sufficient strength to throw them out of the high Mexican saddles, but Master George was sixteen hands and a half, and when his head disappeared between his legs it was no easy thing to keep on a six-pound saddle, and the tightest might have been flung out of it as I was three times one morning before breakfast, these falls irritating my father scarcely less than the long s's had done eight years before, compelling him to declare that no horse could unseat him. Joseph Applely smiled and went out of the room, and next morning my father was thrown in front of the house by the holly-trees, breaking his collar-bone, and the doctor had to be sent for. The Colonel started to enumerate: Wolf Dog, Anonymous, and Corunna have dragged hay out of those very racks, he said; and the coach-house recalled the coach hung on leather straps, and the great phaeton, likewise on leather straps, which hardly ever went out—a museum piece it was—and the tiny phaeton in which our mother used to drive Primrose and Ivory, a beautiful pair of ponies. The great fir at the back of the stable, in front of the hayrick, reminded me of the day that Joseph Applely took me out for a walk and taught me a little bird-lore. The nest he showed me at the end of the bough was a goldfinch's, and we explored the woods together, and far clearer than today is that fragrant morning by the hawthorn-tree all in flower, Joseph lifting me up to see into the blackbird's nest. And I remember his voice: You mustn't touch the eggs, Master George, or the bird will forsake her nest. But how will the bird know? Let's try. We must go back, Master George, and if we return at one we shall get home in time for dinner. Let's go a little farther, Joseph, and find some more nests, I cried, for it did not seem to me that I should ever want dinner again.

But of what was the Colonel thinking? He is like his father, discreet; therefore not a man of letters, and we talked about the foreign firs which our father had planted in the 'sixties, and they seemed to me to be out of keeping with the landscape. Deodars may be suited to India, I said, and the Wellingtonia may be well enough in California, but here they are detestable; and far worse than the deodar and the Wellingtonia is that cypress los—something, a tree of vile habit, sending down branches to take root, creating a little jungle. The Colonel admitted the habit, which he could not well deny, but he could not be persuaded to send round for a couple of hatchets, urging that felling trees is not the light work that I imagined it to be, the real reason being that he is as averse as I am from felling a tree, an aversion inherent in every sensitive nature, one might almost say in every nature except the woodcutter's; habit has blunted his; he has forgotten the original instinct of tree-worship, and perceives no longer the mystery of the vasty height sprung out of a single seed.

It was while I was thinking these things that the great walls of the farmyard rose up through the beech-trees, eighteen or twenty feet high, enclosing buildings of all kinds; stables for many cart-horses, granaries, barns, haggards, byres, smithies. A great deal of cut stone had been used in these buildings, and the Colonel had saved many pieces from the ruins of the smithy, and these he said would come in useful when the time came to rebuild the farmyard. I liked to hear him dreaming his dreams while I meditated the question whether it were crueller to fell an ox or a tree. Behind that wall I had seen death for the first time, and with that kind of morbid pleasure which one feels in wounding oneself, I recalled how the shepherd had come one day into the yard driving half a dozen sheep before him, and how, stopping in my play, I asked him why he had brought them from the fields. He answered me that Friday was always killing day, and putting out his crook he caught a sheep by the leg and felt for the fat; but not being satisfied with the animal, he allowed it to escape from him. Again he put out his crook and caught another, and again he was not satisfied; three or four sheep were tried; it may have been over the fourth that he muttered, This one will do, and led it into a corner. He and his boy stretched it on a slightly raised platform, and I asked why a bucket was placed under its head. To catch the blood, Master George, the shepherd answered as he sharpened his knife; and all this ritual was so enticing that I waited impatiently, and marvelled how it was that the sheep accepted death without a bleat, looking at us all the time with round, peaceful eyes, in which one could read neither love of life, nor fear of death, nor reproach. At last the eyes began to glaze, and I said to the shepherd, He has begun to die, and the shepherd pressed the sheep all over with his great strong fingers, urging the blood out of the wound in the neck. A few days later we were stopped in our walk by strange squealings, and scenting death, we appealed to a peasant; and he told us the butcher was killing pigs. We ran from our governess to see the pigs killed; we hid from her in a stable, and did not venture out till she had given up the search. I'm afraid you're late; he's a goner by this time, the peasant called after us, and when we arrived at the farmyard the carcass was being cut up and salted, and it would be some time before the butcher would be ready for another. The Colonel was a little diffident, uncertain whether he should stay to see a pig killed, but perhaps ashamed to go lest I might laugh at him. I took on authoritative airs, and bade the men hurry, returning now and again to the dung-heap to watch the pigs; there were eleven or twelve rooting and rolling, happy, for the warm May sunlight caressed their sides, and apparently the screams of their fellow, now passed away into salt pork, had not disturbed them. Standing by them I picked out the biggest to be taken next, a pigheaded animal that contested every yard of the way, two rustics dragging him, and myself applying an ash-stick as a goad to his rump, and so cruelly that one of the rustics begged me to desist. He was bleeding under the tail when he was hoisted to the platform, and I felt ashamed of my cruelty; but he was a vicious brute that would have bitten the butcher had it not been for the rope about his snout. The butcher worked his knife slowly through the neck; and I plied him with questions: Why was it that pigs squealed when they were being killed and sheep died without uttering a bleat? Was it because it hurt pigs more to die than it did sheep? The butcher answered that pigs were noisy devils; somebody else added that they liked music, the bagpipes especially—answers that perplexed me; and I stood watching the blood, noting that with its flowing the squeals grew fainter and fainter. Dead he seemed such a stupid thing that I began to wish him alive again. My governess came into the cowyard saying she had been looking for us everywhere; our dinner was ready and we must come at once. But we haven't got the bladder yet. The butcher put his hand into the pig, tore it out, and handed it to us all stinking, our governess begging us to relinquish it, but we explained to her that we were going to blow it out and tie it to the end of a stick. We shall want two more bladders to beat each other with, I explained, and hurried the Colonel through his dinner. I would have brought my sister to the farmyard, where still some more pigs wallowed in the dung-heap outside Fright's stable, waiting the great experience of their lives—the butcher's knife.

Fright was a very handsome thoroughbred horse. He had won some big races—the Cesarewitch, I think—and had gone to the stud with a deformed foreleg. My father was sure Fright would get winners if he were given the right mares, and the horse stood at Moore Hall for many years at ten pounds for thoroughbred mares, five for half-breds; the groom's fee was, I think, the same in every case, five shillings, and it was a very well-earned five shillings, for Fright needed a great deal of coaxing and encouragement before he showed any interest in the mare waiting for him in the yard outside his box, and he would certainly have gone to the knacker's if he had not neighed at the sight of some cart-mares as Pat Kelly was bringing him home from exercise. And seeing that the mares were in the horse's mind, Pat began to tell me how he had spoken in the horse's ear. I was all ear, but Pat became reticent suddenly, and I was left pondering on the mystery of the continuous existence of life in this world.

I had been told, as every child is told, that babies were found under gooseberry-bushes, and had accepted the explanation for some years, but between the ages of ten and twelve this explanation seemed hardly worthy of a boy's serious credence, and I had accepted the only other possible solution—that the female produced children unaided, and had begun to regret my sex when Pat Kelly's words made life seem again worth living. And not to find myself lacking when my day came, I used to hide in the carpenter's shop (the carpenter's shop being next to Fright's stable) so that I might hear Pat encouraging the horse with all kinds of coaxings: That's the old boy, that's the old man, and sometimes with so little effect that Pat's mouth would grow dry and he would curse the horse, and after cursing him he would start another set of coaxings, at the end of which, perhaps, the horse would be led out of the stable. It was then time for me to run out of the carpenter's shop and climb into one of the beech-trees overlooking the yard. One day I succeeded in persuading the Colonel to come with me, and that was the very day that Pat pointed us out to our father, who called to us to come down and caned the Colonel severely.

With all these memories flocking through my mind, it was sad to see the carpenter's shop in ruins, for in it I had spent many days with Micky Murphy trying to learn to use the chisel, the plane, and the saw; but to no purpose did I labour, for I was without handicraft, less gifted than the carpenter's son. The Colonel had never collected hatchets and hammers, saws and chisels, planes and gouges, files and augers and gimlets, and perhaps that is why he had bought an old saw-mill in Ballinrobe and established it in a corner of the haggard where, once upon a time, there used to be great sport ferreting rats in the wheat stacks built upon short stone pillars about three feet from the ground, with a slab on the top to keep out the rats. But a mischievous boy, preferring a rick full of rats to his father's grain, will leave a plank for them to climb; and when threshing-day comes, the rats will scurry before a ferret with the dogs in full tilt after them; and if perchance a curious dog should try to appreciate the smells of rat and ferret and get his nose bitten, he will cry, You'll know better next time, Towser.

Outside the barn was a curious old threshing-machine; two horses yoked to a great beam were the motive power; and these set going within a little stone circle all kinds of wheels and cogwheels, and in response the winnowing-machine inside the barn clattered; and when I came to see how the work was progressing, the women smiled upon me as they fed it with sheaves, asking me not to come too near lest I should have my fingers chopped. When the threshing-machine went out of gear, the flail was flung, and dodging the thresher's weary flingin' tree, I would snatch a handful of grain and throw it to the finches waiting in the fir-trees on the hillside; not out of kindness of heart, but to entice them to their death; for when they assembled in sufficient numbers and were pecking unmindful of danger, two barrels of a fowling-piece were loosed upon them, and the ground was quickly covered with blood and feathers. A boy must learn to shoot, and whilst learning he fires at blackbirds and thrushes on the lawn, at the jackdaws as they hover about the chimneys, at the magpies as they fly from thorn to thorn, and the gulls flapping about the lake's shore are shot at again and again; gulls will dive after a wounded gull, and so the sportsman has a chance of shooting gulls till his heart sickens. And then wandering from the shore into the woods he will shoot a squirrel, a badger, a raven; hawks and owls he considers it his duty to loose upon, and wood-pigeons, too, for they are greedy birds and the farmer does not reap where he has sown. A boy lusts to kill; he will set dogs after a cat, and one day a very beautiful white cat was hunted out of the laundry into the lofts and then out of the lofts; and when the cat escaped by a broken window the dogs were set after her, and when puss crossed the road, the dogs in hot pursuit, she was forced to take to one of the trees growing out of the shelving hillside. The laundry-maids came running down the road pleading for their cat, but a barbarous boy climbed the tree and shook her out of the branches, and in imitation of a huntsman pulled out a knife and cut off the cat's head and distributed the flesh, treating the cat as if she were a wild animal—a hare or a rabbit—whose function it is to provide us with sport as well as food.

You would like to see the Stone Park, the Colonel said. The name of the field awakened a memory pleasanter than the infamous hunting of the cat, a gathering of nuts one summer evening long ago with two laundry-maids and a stable-boy. Perhaps there is nothing that takes a deeper hold on memory than the drawing down of boughs laden with fruit in the dusk of a dead day. We had gathered till strange shadows began to move about the fairy ring spared by my father when he set to work to redeem the Stone Park from the hazel, more acres being needed for the growing of oats, so numerous were the racehorses at Moore Hall at this time. The corn prospered in the virgin soil and a great crop was expected; but our horses got none of it, for our peafowl had encamped in the middle of the field, leaving only a fringe, and the villagers muttered when the birds took to their heels or their wings: The master would have done well not to have meddled with the good people!

The good people seem to have recovered their holding, I said to myself whilst seeking the road that our father had built. But all trace of it was lost in a jungle of blackthorn and hazel. Our mearing was the wall of the great park that had once extended round Castle Carra, and whilst the Colonel narrated his plans for the second ridding of the Stone Park by means of dynamite, I heard him break off in the middle of a sentence: The goats again! and away he went with thirty or forty goats trotting in front of him. It is just as I suspected, said he a little later. They feed on green boughs during the summer, but just at this time of the year they come over the deer-park wall in search of grass.

He told me that he had thought of shooting them, but was afraid to raise up hatred against himself in the country, for the goats were not altogether wild; for certain, somebody had a claim upon them. And he continued talking, but for a long time my thoughts were among the days when we clambered the deer-park wall and wandered to Castle Carra, a great stronghold in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, abandoned so it was said, in the seventeenth, or later, the descendants of the great chieftains having gone to live in the modern house, now a ruin like the castle. In the 'sixties a herdsman lived in a corner of it; we bought goat's milk from him, and how good it was in the noggins, foaming over the brims! The circumstances of the abandonment of the castle must have been wonderful. Or was it abandoned by degrees? At one time all the headland was fortified, but of this vast castle little remains except the central tower or fort, now grown about with thorn and hazel. My mother's wont was to repeat verses from Marmion as we passed under the gateway, and our tablecloth was laid on the grassy space which we believed to be the ancient banqueting-hall. Above us were glimpses of staircases built between the walls, and one day I climbed up the wall and mounted the stairs. But the chieftains had left neither treasure nor pistols nor swords behind them.

We might do a little clearing every year, the Colonel broke in, and all the trees that we get out of the Stone Park can be cut up by the saw-mill, creating a provision of fuel for the house, and in ten or twelve years we shall find we have added many acres of arable land to the estate. Aren't you listening?

Yes, I'm listening, and I think you're right; in about ten or twelve years Moore Hall will have returned to the Moore Hall of before-times. But have you been to Castle Carra lately?

He had visited Castle Carra some three or four months ago, and the castle was crumbling; last Christmas there had been a great downfall; the old gateway had wellnigh disappeared, and he did not think the castle itself would last more than fifty years. The great modern or quasi-modern house, to which the chieftains repaired when private wars were no longer recognised as lawful, is passing away, he said, even more rapidly than the castle. I found pieces of the great stone fox that stood in the middle of the courtyard and the two hounds one on either side among the brushwood. Another thing. Castle Island needs repair. Michael Malia was on the island last summer, and he tells me that the base of the old castle is insecure, but that a few pounds would make it safe.

My dear Maurice, it is sad to see ancient Ireland passing away before our eyes. But we cannot rebuild ancient Ireland, and it is clear to me that as soon as I am gone Moore Hall will be pulled down to build cottages in Derrinany and Ballyholly, or the house will become a monkery or a nunnery. Which would you prefer?

The Colonel sought refuge in silence, and I read in the melancholy that overspread his face that the abandonment of family property to the prelacy was distasteful to him. And now that Llewellyn has given Ballinafad to the monks, he may, I said to myself, be more willing than he was some years ago to allow me to bring up one of his children a Protestant, on condition, of course, that I leave him Moore Hall. I had written to him once on this very subject, and his answer had reached me in Paris. A very angry letter it was, characterising my proposal as infamous and outrageous. Why should my proposal be looked upon as infamous and disgraceful? I had asked myself, and I began to ask myself again the same question. He may, I said, think differently now; circumstances have changed. Moreover, the proposal might be put to him again in conversation; words pass rapidly; there is no time for anger if they be dealt out skilfully; and I thought how after dinner, when his wife had gone to bed and we were sitting in two armchairs before the turf fire, I might begin by complaining that now that Stella and Walter Osborne and Hughes were gone, Dublin had become a little too small for me. He would ask me whether I was going to London or to Paris. Paris would introduce Dujardin's name, and I would tell him that Dujardin's ambitions were to found a new religion in which there was no dogma, only rite. The Colonel would shrug his shoulders and ask how rite could exist independently of dogma, and I would answer that there was no dogma in ancient religions. The Colonel would answer, Judaism, and I would explain incidentally that the Jews had never indulged in heresy hunting. It was not permitted to insult Jehovah, and anybody who did so was condemned to death, as Socrates was condemned for insulting the Gods. Dogma and its concomitant, heresy hunting, arose when? What Pope founded the Holy Order? The Reformation would be mentioned, and it would be an easy transition from the Reformation to my proposal.

We make these plans, but very rarely do we adhere to them; and after dinner, when we two were sitting in the drawing-room, without prelude or introductory matter of any kind, I said:

My dear Maurice, I have a proposal to make to you. I am quite willing to pay for the education of your eldest son, and to leave him any property and pictures that may remain after my death, but I should like to bring him up a Protestant. Our family is a Protestant family; there are one or two apostates, it is true, but—

I should never consent to what you are proposing. You needn't go on.

I'm sorry for that, for of course it is impossible for you to deny that Catholicism makes for illiteracy. As I have pointed out again and again, Catholicism has hardly produced a book worth reading since the Reformation.

But I deny that completely.

It doesn't suit you to admit it. But this you will admit, that if Catholicism degrades, corrodes, paralyses, and stupefies the intelligence, its day is over.

I admit that, if your premises be correct, but I deny your premises.

To deny is easy; but if what I say be not true, if Catholics have written as well as Agnostics and Protestants, the books are known. Name them.

At the end of a long waste of argument, I said:

Well, if you are convinced that the Catholic is equal to the Protestant, why not bring the matter to the test? Do you bring up one of your sons a Catholic, I will bring up the other a Protestant, and back him to be the superior of the Catholic boy, to the extent of five hundred pounds. I'll be generous. If I win, I will give the five hundred to the Catholic as a sort of consolation prize.

The proposal you are making to me is utterly inacceptable and horrible. I can't think of anything more detestable than that I should give you one of my children to be brought up in a religion of which I disapprove, and that I should be tempted to do this by a promise that you will leave him money! If, later on, my children were to tell me that they preferred Protestantism to Catholicism, I don't say that I shouldn't be sorry, but I should do nothing to prevent them following the religion which they wished to follow, but if they were to change their religion in order to inherit property, or to get money, I should hate the very sight of them.

But, my dear Maurice, nobody except Cardinal Newman ever changed his religion for theological reasons. All changes of religion are brought about by pecuniary or sexual reasons.

The Colonel did not answer. He lay back in his armchair white with passion, the first time I had ever seen him lose his temper since he was a little boy. It would have been easier to let the matter drop, but I had determined to make a last attempt to save the boy, and could not stop half-way.

You told me I libelled my great-grandfather when I hinted that he became a Catholic because it was impossible to carry on business in Spain as a Protestant.

And I say so still; but we're not talking now of our great-grandfather, but of my children.

But you knew that our great-grandfather never became a Catholic, and knowing the truth why did you conceal it? Because you are a Catholic?

We are talking now of the religion my children are being brought up in, and I say that your proposal is not an honourable one, and if possible it would be less honourable of me to accept it.

Everybody has his own ideas of honour; there is no fixed standard; but it is a very common thing, as you must know, that when parents are divided in religious beliefs some of the children are brought up in one religion and some in another, and it would be difficult to impugn the fairness of such an arrangement. I am prejudiced in favour of Protestantism for intellectual reasons, and because my life is moulded on facts rather than upon sentimentalities. And the answer I got from the Colonel was that I looked at the world through a narrow tube and could only see one spot at a time, and that my opinions were always as narrow as the tube; and then, getting angrier and angrier, his face bleaching with a passion which I could not help admiring, for at all events he was himself in this scene, he reminded me that I had said I would leave Moore Hall to his children, but no sooner had I said that than I began to impose conditions. In the beginning they were to learn Irish, that was the condition; now a new condition was to be imposed, they were to be brought up Protestants.

Not both, only one, I protested; and if I pay for his education you can't expect me to bring up a boy in a religion which I think paralyses the intelligence. Your concern is with the possibility of a future life, the soul's arrival in Purgatory and its subsequent release by means of Masses paid for the Pope's indulgences, and—