And when on a subsequent occasion my brother told me, in answer to a question, that I had been paying fifty pounds a year to the Jesuits, and afterwards one hundred and thirty a year to the Benedictines for the education of my nephew, I uttered the cry or moan of a man taken with a sudden sickness. The sensation the news brought me was, strangely enough, physical, a sort of fainting in the very bowels, or else I cannot describe it. I wrote to you from Paris offering to pay for my nephew's education, I said, if he were brought up a Protestant, and the answer I got was that my proposal was a dishonourable one. How, then, could you think that I was willing to pay for a Catholic education? and it has been going on year after year and I was never told. His answer was that he would repay me; and with the transference of some hundreds of pounds from Cox's to the National Bank, the question of money would be settled between us. But there is no question of money, I bewailed. I don't care a fig for the money. But the deception ... I could not answer him further; the shock of the discovery deprived me of any power of reasoning, and I ascended the stairs, thinking as well as I could that any calamity had been preferable to the one that had befallen me, and that I should have been paying for the education of a Catholic while meditating Hail and Farewell rankled like salt in a wound. While writing Ave and Salve, I muttered, and a deeper sense of unhappiness than I had ever known before began to steal over me as I dragged my feet along the landing to the room in which I was to sleep.

I shall get no sleep tonight, I said, raising the blind in the hope that the moon shining on the lake would calm me; and my eyes roved over the dim outlines of the lake into the pearly distances neither blue nor grey. A moment later the words: He is a born Catholic, fell from my lips, and the phrase seemed to me to represent a truth hitherto unexpected or insufficiently appreciated. We do not acquire our religion, we bring it into the world. We are born Catholics or Protestants. Catholicism and Protestantism are attitudes of mind. And I pondered the question for what seemed a long while, awakened suddenly by the thought that if my nephews had a worth they would discover themselves to be Protestants. From eighteen to twenty-one is the time when we stick for ever or find a way out. Every man of worth chooses a religion for himself, and so my money has been only wasted; but it has not gone to the moulding of a soul. All the same, I would not have had this happen, no, not for all the money in the world. And I fell to thinking how I had laughed and jeered at dear Edward because he dreaded lest his money might be applied to the production of heretical plays; yet here was I suffering from the same dread. The perfect circle of the moon detained my thoughts a little while, and the lonely castle beneath it set me thinking of savage hordes of Welsh and Irish disputing for possession of the island. But however far our thoughts may wander we are awakened by the old pain. My senses sickened again. A judgment upon me, I cried, for having jeered at dear Edward! And at the words: dear Edward, my thoughts sped away to Bayreuth and returned to my brother and to our childhood. My mind, I said, is like an ever-veering wind, and sleep will be sought in vain; all the same, I must seek sleep. And all night long the same thoughts revisited me, marching round my brain like prisoners in a yard, high walls, and no strip of sky above the multitudinous bricks. Round and round they go, I cried, and then away went my thoughts again, and of what I was thinking when I feel asleep I cannot tell.

Your bath-water is ready, sir.

Yes, yes, I answered, and turned over. If I could only cease to think! But the moment I see him I shall begin to think again of Jesuits and Benedictines. Of what shall we speak? I asked, and going to the bath, and in the bath, and coming from the bath, I tried to discover subjects of conversation, lingering over my dressing, and so advantageously that Evelyn was dispensing tea and coffee and when I entered the dining-room, and after breakfast I thanked her kindly when she said:

Now, Maurice, won't you take George out and show him the new gateway, which he says he has not seen sufficiently?

The Colonel murmured some answer, and whilst hustling himself into his old yellow overcoat, he told me that the part of the ironwork missing from the gates brought from Newbrook had been supplied by the smith at Carnacun, and that he was curious to hear if I should be able to distinguish the old from the new. The stonework was complete, all except two knobs; these Michael Malia would be able to replace, and the cost would not be more than five or ten pounds a knob. His optimism was somewhat dismal, for I never imagined anybody living in Moore Hall again, and after viewing the gateway which had only cost me forty pounds, we turned down the road to the gate lodge, now empty, the Colonel having succeeded in expelling its late tenants, his gardener. A gate lodge, I said, is generally beside the gate, but this one is fifty yards away. The Colonel declared it to be an excellent house, and I meditated, for this gate lodge was associated in my mind with many memories. It had a loft which was reached by a ladder, and I had often thought that I would like to sleep in a loft among the hay; and there was a deep drain beyond the garden at the edge of the wood, and down this drain I had often floated on a raft made out of a plank and the shutters from the windows, into deep water under the bridge. It was a thrilling experience to find oneself on a raft under an arch, but the novelty wore away quickly, and one day I had undertaken a longer voyage, punting the raft down the drain into the lake. But in the lake the punt pole (a branch torn from a tree) had proved insufficient, and the freshening wind had carried me and the raft out into the open lake, and looking at the Colonel I remembered him crying among the rushes while I debated my chances, whether it would be better to remain on the raft trusting it to carry me to some island, or to throw myself from it into the lake in the hope that the water was not deep enough to drown me. The waves leaped higher and higher, threatening to wash the shutters from the plank, till at last it became clear that the chance that the water was not deep enough to drown me would have to be accepted. It rose to my chin, lifting me off my feet, and I continued wading, hoping not to stumble into a hole. Yes, I said to the Colonel, I had a near escape that day from drowning, and now I can still see you running along the strand crying for some one to come and save your brother. If the accident had happened a few years before, he said, you would have been drowned; the lake was deeper, and he told me how in the 'sixties a young engineer had come down from the Board of Works with a project for draining Lough Carra into Lough Mask, but our father had offered such opposition to the scheme that it had to be abandoned. Up to the 'seventies, I answered, we were feudal lords, and he was listened to in the House of Commons when he said that he could not allow a small Sahara to be created before his front door. We controlled our landscapes in those days, or it may have been that the shores of Lough Mask were implicated in this drainage scheme. As likely as not it was discovered that the draining of Lough Carra would inundate the shores of Lough Mask. A weir was therefore constructed in the River Robe, said the Colonel, and his words revived the day I had brought a boat from Lough Carra to Lough Mask and had put back frightened by the great waves of that gloomy lake.

Our father saved Lough Carra, but it is for certain many feet lower than it used to be; and I reminded the Colonel of the great pleasure-boat about whose rotting planks we often played in childhood. It had been allowed to rot under a group of pines, standing some fifty or sixty yards from the lake's edge, by the side of a walled trench, once its harbour. For to what other purpose could the walled trench have been put? we often asked our governess, our subsequent questions drifting into dim speculation as to how many pounds it would cost to mend the boat; and if Micky Murphy could mend it if he were paid ten pounds. This rotting boat appealed to our imaginations, for its seats would hold a dozen or more ladies and gentlemen, and there were rowlocks for eight oars, and the Colonel and I were wont to imagine the great picnic-parties that had sat under the sail, for there was a hole in one of the seats for a mast. Was Castle Hag or Castle Island the destination of these picnic-parties? we asked each other; and was there a turkey stuffed with chestnuts in the hamper? We were certain that there were cakes and fruits and jams, and that the footman spread a snowy cloth in the glade under the castle wall. Our governess read while we dreamed. We! Did the Colonel dream? If he did, he never told me his dreams. He is reticent about his dreams, but garrulous about externals, and as we walked round the shores of Lough Carra for the last time, he regretted that he had not brought with him the key of the new boat-house, for he would like to show me his brother-in-law's boats, rowing-boats, skiffs, wherries, a steam launch, and a yacht. A shrunken lake for certain, else the reeds would not have thriven. —— had had to cut a passage through them for his boats, and the Colonel unfolded a project to me whereby the lake might be cleared of reeds, and before he had reached the end of his project we were at the bridge that stretches over the turlough (a turlough in Mayo is a low-lying field, that is flooded in winter), and he pointed out the pump that drew the water from a well out in the middle of the lake—a well that old Betty MacDonald told us was once up in Kiltoome, but it had suddenly descended and had sprung up in the lake, with a ring of grass around it, for it was a holy, or maybe a fairy well. She was note quite sure which. The pump had cost me two hundred pounds, but I had to admit that if people were to live at Moore Hall, a pump was necessary. The walls require mending, I remarked, coming upon a cottage that my father had built but had never put a roof on; and I added, A ruin that will supply excellent material for the building of necessary walls.

But the Colonel said there was plenty of stone, and no need either to pull down the cottage or to roof it. The walls were probably too rotten to bear a roof, and, speaking of the Congested Districts Board, he said, They even ask for the paddock, the field behind the cottage. The fields beyond the gate were Corrour, the New Gardens, Lough Navadogue, Rochetown, and our father's racecourse, on which he had trained Corunna, Wolf Dog, Anonymous, Crough Patrick, and Master George, to number a few of his famous horses, and all these fields the Congested District Board required.

So that the holdings of three tenants might be extended, the Colonel said; and if you yield, Moore Hall will be no more than a villa in the midst of a wild country; cottagers within the woods right up against Kiltoome, and who can say that pigsties will not be built? The present cottagers would probably prevent the pigs from rotting in the graveyard, but the cottagers fifty years hence will have no scruples. The Board insist on acquiring all the land right up to Kiltoome, and at their own price, and if you refuse to sell, the Board may refuse to buy your other estates, Ballintubber, and those in Galway and Roscommon. A very serious matter for you if the Board refused to buy.

How is that?

The next move of the Board will be to stir up all the tenants to combine in a campaign against rent—like putting a stick into a wasp's nest, the Colonel added, with a deep note of anger in his voice. So far as I understand, the proposal is to leave you Derrinrush.

We returned to Moore Hall, and so gloomy were our thoughts that we turned aside instinctively from the Dark Road and ascended the steep lawn together.



I think that anybody who would like to live in a comfortable house—

Square rooms and lofty passages conformed to the ideas of our ascendants, and jerry-built villas, all gables, red tiles, and mock beams, stand for modern taste and modern comfort; hot water on every landing and electric light. Nobody wants a real house unless an American millionaire, and it is not because of its reality that he wants it but for its unreality. It is unreal to him, and having a great deal of money, he indulges in eccentricity. In this way the old world is carried on by Americans; even in England there are very few houses that are the capitals of the estate they stand in as Moore Hall was up to fifty years ago. Moore Hall is out of date, and it astonishes me that you don't feel it. I wish in a way that I could summon sufficient courage to pull it down and sell it; it would make excellent rubble to build labourers' cottages, and if I could I would cut down every tree and lay the hillside bare. Why not, since I know it will be laid bare a few years after my death? The fate that overtook Ashbrook hangs over Muckloon. It will be given over to peasants, like Ashbrook. You remember the piece of tapestry that was woven in Ashbrook by our great-grand-aunt or grandmother and is now on exhibition in South Kensington Museum? I wonder how long it will be before another piece of tapestry like that is woven in Mayo. In the dining-room hangs a portrait of a lady with a dog, painted by a young girl in Galway. Is there one in Galway now who would paint as well? No. With all our so-called culture, sculpture, painting, architecture, and the art of the use of words are disappearing. By the way, Maurice, I don't know whether you have heard my theory that the age of art is over as much as the Stone Age.

People have always been saying, he answered, that the age of art is over. I could cite you many passages from Elizabethan writers in which they deplore the decline of art and the English language. They were wrong, I replied, that is all. But it cannot be denied that there was neither art nor literature in Europe in the Middle Ages, from the sixth, shall we say, to the twelfth century? The Colonel answered me that art cannot flourish in the midst of invasions; and he began: Rome was sacked by Alaric in the fifth century, and in the same century Europe was overrun by the Huns, headed by Attila, and a century later the Saracens invaded Europe and were defeated by the French at the Battle of Tours; and as we walked toward the house he explained that if this defeat had not taken place we might all be Mohammedans now.

But do you think that the sleep of Mohammedanism is a deeper sleep than the sleep of Catholicism? I beg your pardon for introducing the religious question. You are appreciative of the trend of the past, but seem blind to that of the present. I cannot help being sorry for my poor country that has never been able to show a brave face to the world. Some extraordinary curse seems to have been laid upon this land in the tenth century or about that time. Ireland was something then; she had a religion of her own—and she was inventing an art of her own. Up to the tenth century it looked as if God intended to do something for Ireland, and in the tenth or the eleventh century he changed his mind, and ever since the curse seems to have been deepening. In another fifty years Ireland will have lost all the civilisation of the eighteenth century and will be a swamp of peasants with a priest here and there, the exaltation of sacraments and whisky her lot, and a hundred legislators united only in protecting monkeries and nunneries from secular inquisition. The Colonel did not agree with me that the gentry were dying out in Mayo. The Brownes of Breaghwy and the Lynches of Partry had been building lately. My dear Maurice, you will not see things as they are. Or is it that you don't remember Mayo in the days of the gentry as well as I do? Athy Valley is empty, and you told me that you and an old peasant had searched for traces of Browne Hall, but could find none. Ballinafad is a monastery. The Blakes are still in Tower Hill, and a last Lynch lives his lonely life in Clogher. Cornfield is empty, and will be pulled down very soon. The Knoxs have left Creagher. Newbrook is sold, and the masonry distributed—part of it is at the end of the drive. Brownestown House was burnt before our time, but not much before it. How many more? The Lamberts are gone. What was the name of their place? Brook something.

Every class has its ups and downs, and there is no doubt that ours is going through a crisis.

No crisis whatsoever. We have outlived our day, that is all; and in thirty years we shall be, as I have said, as extinct as the dodo, unless religion comes to our aid. You seem not to have heard of the New French party—the Catholic Atheists? Religion is to be taught again in the hope that man may be persuaded to forgo the joy of a woman's bosom for the sake of Abraham's. The Colonel laughed, but he was not pleased, and to break the irritating silence he told me that Castle Carra had been sold to the Congested Districts Board, and out of the arch, built during the famine, a row of concrete cottages had been run up according to specifications. The old deer park will supply some material, I said. The jungle will be grubbed up; you will get rid of the goats. And we talked on in this fashion, and after dinner resumed the same talk, saying the same things over and over again; and when we ascended the stairs to our beds, about eleven o'clock, the Colonel promised to drive me over to Llewellyn's monastery next day.

Llewellyn Blake is my uncle, my mother's youngest brother, and he came into the property of Ballinafad on the death of Joe Blake, famous in the county Mayo for many racehorses and a love story. Joe seems to have been the only one in the family whose soul did not trouble him. His brother Mark, from whom he inherited the property of Ballinafad, was a fine old country rake, leaving samples of his voice and demeanour and appearance in every village, and then going to Dublin to repent his sins, attaining in the last years of his life the spectacular appearance of Father Christmas, causing much annoyance in the chapels that he frequented from his incurable habit of interrupting the services with Oh, Lord; oh, Lord; my unfortunate soul! Llewellyn is as tall as his brother Mark, two or three inches over six feet, large in proportion, with sloping shoulders, snapping his words out and then relapsing into silence. He used to be much admired at dances in the drawing-rooms of Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares, and in the old Royalty Theatre he patronised the Muse Terpsichore. But those days are over and done with, and, like his brother Mark, he has become uneasy about his soul. He was warned of its disease by me years ago, but he paid no heed to my warnings, and convinced of its continuous existence, and that priests can help him to save it, he has founded a monastery. I should do the same if I were a Roman Catholic, but the Colonel, who is one, would have me try to prevent the founding of this monastery by action at law, and I am still trying to understand the Colonel who believes in the efficacy of masses for the dead, but seems to think that Llewellyn's relations should come before his soul—a most impossible Colonelesque argument; and the spirit fumed within me to express my point of view; but I put chains upon my spirit, and Carnacun went by for the last time. We were on the heights of Ballyglass when the struggling spirit sundered its last fetters, and I said:

How is it that you disapprove of this monastery? It seems to me that you should, on the contrary, urge me to found another at Moore Hall. You believe that masses for the dead will get your soul out of Purgatory. If you don't, you are not a Catholic. Now, why shouldn't we have a little plump of monasteries in Mayo? At Moore Hall we could have Benedictines; at Clogher Franciscans. Lynch is a Roman Catholic: he has got no children, what better could he do? At Tower Hill some arrangements might be come to with the Blakes to put in Trappists. You don't know what order is in Ballinafad? The Colonel answered sullenly that he was not sure whether Llewellyn had founded a mission house or a monastery. Well, no matter. This little plump of monasteries sending up prayers for your soul, for Llewellyn's soul, for Lynch's soul, and for the souls of all at Tower Hill; and the prayers bringing down the archangels constantly, crooks in their hands, pulling you one after the other out of Purgatory. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost; nectar perpetually on tap, and aureoles that never wear out. A rich prospect before you all!

An ironical smile, deliberately introduced, pervaded the Colonel's face, and it said as plainly as words: How very superficial you are, and vulgar, quite vulgar!

My dear friend, I am sorry for bringing up this question again. It is the fault of Llewellyn Blake.

Count Llewellyn Blake. He has been made Count of the Papal States, said the Colonel.

But why laugh? In his eyes the Pope is not only a spiritual, but a temporal power. His title is more valid than any other. Don't you think so?

The Colonel never answers these questions, and while wondering at my own detestable character in thus plaguing him, I looked round the fields. They seemed very small and dim. And yet, I said, that gleam of light falling across the worn fields reminds us that summer is coming in. The fine days we meet in January are illusory, but the ray that lights up the dim February landscape is a herald. We believe in it, and that is the principal thing.

A peasant stood in the roadway in front of the car, and the Colonel had to pull up.

Long life to yer honour, cried the old man, and in his eyes I read the reverence of yore. He was a hairy and boisterous fellow, and we had to listen to his description of his house, which he said was damp enough to give a wild-duck rheumatism. I promised to help him, and we bade him godspeed. A godspeed, I said, which is probably for eternity.

We are very late, the Colonel muttered. It was unlucky meeting him.

Don't say that. It is pleasant to meet literature on the road from Ballyglass to Ballinafad.

The road looped the shoulder of a hill, and beyond a long straight bridge or viaduct we spied the gate of Ballinafad.

But, said the Colonel, I am afraid that this gate is always kept locked. You'll miss your train.

If I were to miss a thousand trains, I will see Llewellyn's monastery.

You'll certainly miss your train. It is two miles round—two Irish miles.

He pulled up before a rusty gate, and bounding out of the trap, I shook it. It was locked, but there was a stile beside it.

We can send the trap round to the other gate, which is nearer by two miles to the station, and walk up to the house.

Yes, we can do that, he said.

Then let us do it, for I must see Llewellyn's mission house or monastery.

Before Moore Hall, Ballinafad was, the Colonel answered, and he told me how the Blakes had kept their property through the Penal Laws by a special charter granted to them by Charles II. The charter he assured me was still preserved, and I asked if all this comely woodland were going to be given over to the monks. Groves in which, I said, it would be easy to imagine a rout of nymphs and satyrs. Or Thyrsis praying the goat-herd to seat himself in the shelter of that great oak, and pipe to him. Delightful woods. And whilst talking of Amaryllis, Silenus and the Zephyrs, some twenty or thirty youths passed across the glade, and having need to overtake them for inquiry we called to their shepherd, who stopped his flock. He told us that we should find Father —— 'within,' and on the house coming into view I said: I always hated that strange porch, so out of keeping is it with the landscape.

The Colonel answered that the house was built by our grandfather, Maurice Blake, a soldier who had served in the Peninsula, and that the porch was probably an imperfect memory of one he had seen in Italy on his way home. No attempt, I said, has been yet made to give the house an ecclesiastical air.

The ecclesiastical changes will come later on, the Colonel replied, and he expounded once more the complex question of Llewellyn's rights under his father's will, and he continued to expound it whilst I looked round the drawing-room in which my mother and her sisters had certainly played a selection from Norma, and in which Joe had strummed his memories of Traviata and Il Trovatore for Biddy's and for his own amusement. The remembered pictures were still on the walls—setters creeping up to birds, probably grouse; and I began to peer into the painting like a Bond Street dealer, for the approach of a priest always sets me mumming. The door opened, and a young man of sleek speech and calves begged us to be seated; and choosing the most comfortable chair for himself, and tossing himself till he discovered its easiest corner, he told us that a large number of the last batch of missionaries sent out to West Africa had died, the climate being unhealthy, but another batch was going out shortly, and he hoped not to lose so many.

And did those that died pray for the soul of Count Llewellyn Blake?

He hoped that they had done so, for Count Llewellyn Blake had done a great deal for them, and I put it to him that Llewellyn's soul was a heavy tax upon the population of Mayo, something like seventeen out of thirty-six having died. We asked him some questions regarding the possibility of converting the savages to a more rational spirituality than that which they practised in the forest.

We meet with a great many difficulties; first and foremost the unwillingness of the men to relinquish their wives.

I asked if any provision was being made for the abandoned wives?

The young man admitted that they had not thought out that side of the question.

The children, I answered, offer you a fairer field.

Yes, we try to get hold of the children, he answered; and after some conversation with me about the climate of Africa being answerable for much of the faith of the savages in their superstitions, the young priest turned to the Colonel, and ventured to express a hope that he would come over again from Moore Hall to see them, bringing his two little boys with him. Father Zimmermann, who is at present in Switzerland, he said, will be back in Ballinafad at the end of the month.

The whole scheme is intimately associated with Father Zimmermann, the Colonel said on our way to the stables. A very different man from the one we have seen.

But how can he be different and continue the traffic he is engaged in? I cannot disassociate a man from his work as you do. A man is his work.

In the stables we were met by some of Joe Blake's hirelings, stablemen of old time who had seen the cracks go up to the Curragh, and they lamented the change; a foreign priest, they said, come to take Irishmen away to Africa, one whom Count Llewellyn had met at Ballinafad some two or three years ago, and when he ordered Jimmy Glynn to ready the dining-room for Mass, they began to have a notion of what was going to happen. The tenants, too, had got wind of the change, and were waiting at the hall door, asking how much of the land the Count was going to make over to the Swiss boyo, who was up to the height of his ankles in carpets before he took up with religion. Literature again, I whispered, and listened with glee to the tale of how the Swiss boyo and the Count had escaped through the garden, but were caught up at Lakemount, brought to bay, and how getting round them the peasants had sworn that every one of them would turn Protestant if any bloody monks were put into Ballinafad. The rain that came towards us aslant over the bog was in our faces, and with large drops running down my nose I continued: The monks and Llewellyn's anxiety about his soul may well bring about a revival of Christianity. You heard them say they would turn Protestant.

I think the word Protestant was a sop for you, the Colonel answered.

The rain splashed in our faces, making conversation difficult, and when it ceased I heard the Colonel's voice saying from under his mackintosh: I should like to outwit Llewellyn.

It is very difficult for me to understand you, for you are not moved by any mean sense of future pecuniary loss to yourself; your fingers do not itch to clutch. Family feeling is strong in you, stronger than in me. No one could be more shocked than you when I told you that I had heard the ecclesiastics had gotten Howth Castle, and the disappearance of Ballinafad affects you in the same way. Yet you contrive to reconcile admiration of the cause with detestation of the result. For, of course, as long as priests can persuade people that Masses for the dead will get their souls out of Purgatory they will continue to despoil their relations.

The rain is coming on again, the Colonel interjected, and if the train isn't late we shall miss it. At every hill I asked how far we were from the station. The train was late, and walking up the platform I grew so bitter about Catholicism that he at last said: A religion, at all events, that has made more converts than any other.

The witless and hysterical—ladies who have been through the Divorce Courts and young men with filthy careers behind them.

The train steamed in, and the porter cried, First class behind! Would you like to have your hat-box in the carriage with you? Yes, I answered mechanically, and jumped into the train, glad to escape from a wrangle that had become unendurable. The Colonel had said the night before last that we had better not see each other, and though the words seemed hard I could not resist their truth, for it was indeed a relief to get away from him. Catholics and Protestants don't mix; we are never comfortable in the society of Catholics. The guard blew his whistle, the train moved up the platform, the Colonel passed out of sight, and I said: So this is the end. He thinks that I have changed. We have both changed, and the fault is neither with him nor with me. He was born a Papist, and this is the end; unendurable words if we have given all our love. And thinking how much I had lost, I sat looking out on the wet fields of Mayo. So this is the end! I cried, scaring a fellow-passenger, who looked at me askance over his newspaper. He returned to his paper, I to my thoughts, which were no longer with the Colonel but with myself. In which direction does my life lie? I asked. My mission in Ireland is over, and there is little casual visiting in Paris. I shall write less and read more, and the large book containing the thirty-six plays will never be out of my hand.

At the prospect of becoming another Sir Sidney Lee, Paris began to recede, and I remembered that Steer and Tonks and Sickert lived in London. But even if I live in London I shall have to spend my evenings alone, unless I join a club. Bayreuth falls only every second year, and the concerts at the Queen's Hall are often common enough. Saint-Saëns and Dvorak are often played, and a private orchestra is beyond my means. But with a piano.... A piano demands a wife, and with one who could play Schumann, Schubert, Wagner, Chopin, and Liszt, the evenings would go by happily, an excellent cigar in my mouth, my stern in a comfortable armchair. Had I married Doris I should have an hour and a half of music every evening, and if the rule were maintained for several years, we should get through the vast pile of chamber-music. I have a taste for Scarlatti; and if this admirable woman who can play all Bach were to bear me a child, he would inherit his mother's musical ear, and it is not likely that my son would lack inventive faculty and sense of composition. And while watching the musical instinct developing in him, my heart will be filling with joy, and I shall look forward to hearing all the ridiculous and uncouth strains that have tempted and deceived me reduced to shape, but not in symphonies—my son will write operas, the words as well as the music, for I should like him to inherit as much of my literary gifts as will enable him to construct the poem on which to weave the woof, but not more.

My thoughts were away in a jiffy in France, for the German musical idiom is worn to rags; but there is a musical atmosphere in France, and I remembered a great stone bridge with fishermen sitting on the quays, their legs hanging over the side. I had watched their floats being carried down by the current last year, had seen them lift their floats out of the current and drop them in again, and had waited, pretending to myself, that I would like to see a fish rise, but really interested in the adventure that I knew to be at my heels. An empty fly came by, and the driver asked if he might take me to Chinon. It seemed as if I heard the name, and feeling Chinon to be my adventure, I jumped into the carriage, and was driven along a road of which I remember nothing except a steep hill and at the top of it a feudal castle in ruins. Our poor little horse could hardly drag us up the hill, and the coachman turned in his seat and began to relate some history; but at that moment my eyes were taken up by a poster representing a house, or castle—I was not sure which—an extravagant painting it was. Post-Impressionism, I said, at Chinon; and dismissing the driver, I applied to an old man sitting by the side of the gate, his shaggy dog beside him, for information.

C'est le portrait de la maison.

Laquelle? Pardon, monsieur, mais je ne vois pas une maison ici qui ait pu vous servir de modèle.

La maison n'est pas encore construite. Je l'ai seulement dessinée pour inspirer l'acheteur de la propriété que voici. Le clos St Georges.

Une vraie petite aventure, I said to myself and followed the old man round the enclosure, amused by the pomp with which he vaunted the excellence of his grapes and the courtesy with which he invited my admiration of the pears and peaches ripening on the southern wall. I had seen fine peaches and pears at home, but never flowers like silk gathered into a rosette. And seeing that I was genuinely ignorant, he told me the tree in question was a grenadier, and trying to remember what a grenadier was in English, I stood admiring the roofs of Chinon under the hill.

C'est là où naquit notre grand Rabelais.

Finir mes jours en face de la ville de Rabelais; quelle joie pour un Irlandais!

Mais, monsieur, vous êtes encore jeune; cinquante et quelques années; and he looked at me interrogatively and regretfully, for the old man was seventy et quelques années.

Ici, je voudrais vivre et mourir, I answered mechanically.

Rien ne vous empêche, monsieur, d'acheter ma vigne ... et pas cher. Voyez-vous il y a des avantages; and he led me down into a pit which he had digged in the centre of the enclosure, and pointed out to me a great many stones and broken arches.

Il y a de quoi bâtir une jolie maison; and I learnt from him that these stones had once formed part of the castle, that it was here that Henry of Anjou (Henry II of England) had died on the altar steps, and that the house I had in mind, with the old carvings he had stacked by the hut in which he and his dog lived let into the walk, would not cost me more than a thousand pounds to build. He asked me if I would like to see his pictures, for when he was not spraying his vines he was painting scenes from the life of Joan of Arc in distemper, and spraying vines had become hard work; he was seventy-five, and wished to finish his paintings before he died.

Achetez donc ma vigne, monsieur; finissez vos jours en face de la ville où naquit notre grand Rabelais.

Why not?

And now with the advent of my new idea—that a musician was the legitimate end of my life—the Clos St Georges began to acquire a new and potent significance. She and the boy and the vineyard will be the pear and the peach, the apricot, the nectarine, the bottle of wine from my own vineyard. My life will have to end somewhere. Why not in the Clos St Georges? Because Hail and Farewell must be written, a voice answered from within. Before the vineyard could be purchased and the house built Hail and Farewell must be finished. Ave was in the publisher's hands; a good deal of Salve was written; there was a sketch, chapter for chapter, down to the very end. And between Mullingar and Dublin I realised, more acutely than I had ever done before, that Hail and Farewell could not be abandoned for a vineyard. I have been led to write it, by whom I know not, but I have been led by the hand like a little child. And it was borne in upon me at the same time that a sacrifice was demanded of me, by whom I knew not, nor for what purpose, but I felt I must leave my native land and my friends for the sake of the book; a work of liberation I divined it to be—liberation from ritual and priests, a book of precept and example, a turning-point in Ireland's destiny, and yet I prayed that I might be spared the pain of the writing it and permitted instead to acquire the Clos St Georges, a wife, and a son. But no man escapes his fate. Something was propelling me out of Ireland, whither I was not yet sure. I must yield to instinct, I said to AE. He was deeply moved.

You are going away from us to spend your evenings with Steer and Tonks, but where shall I spend mine?

It may grieve you to lose me, dear AE, and it grieves me to lose you.... I shall never find anybody like you again. AE is only found once in a lifetime.

You'll not forget me? he said, grasping my hand.

The next night we met at Bailey's, the Land Commissioner, who lives in Earlsfort Terrace. I had gained his friendship in the last year of my sojourn in Ireland, and found his alert and witty mind so pleasant that I had begun to think it a pity I had let him go by unknown for so many years. Bailey knows a good picture and buys one occasionally, he reads books and has practised literature, and will probably practise it again; some day he will write his memoirs. And, better still, he practises life, going away every year for long travel, to return to Ireland, his mind enriched. He has not influenced me in my life as AE, or John Eglinton, or Yeats, and to speak of him here is a little outside of my subject, but if I closed this book without mention of him it would seem that I had forgotten the many hours we passed together. Besides, his dinner-party is fixed in my mind. He assembled all my friends: AE, Ernest Longworth, Philip Hanson, John Healy, John Eglinton, the graceful and witty Dena Tyrrell, and Susan Mitchell, who sang songs about the friends I was leaving behind me.

On a grey windless morning in February the train took me to Kingstown, and I had always looked forward to leaving Ireland in May, seeking the words of a last farewell or murmuring the words of Catullus when he journeyed over land and sea to burn the body of his brother, fitting them to my circumstance by the change of a single word:

ATQUE IN PERPETUUM, MATER, AVE ATQUE VALE,

but our dreams and circumstances are often in conflict, and never were they in greater opposition than the day the train took me from Westland Row past a long, barren tract of sand: a grey sky hanging low over the sea far away in the offing without a ripple upon it. If the evening had been a golden evening my heart might have overflowed with fine sentiments; for it is on golden evenings that fine sentiments overflow the heart! the heart is then like crystal that the least touch will break; but on a cold, bleak, February morning the prophet is as uninspired as his humblest fellow, and a very humble fellow, forgetful of Ireland, forgetful of Catholicism, forgetful of literature, went below to think of the friends he had left behind him—AE and the rest.