To realise this is to understand how so many sentimental, virtuous, and sensuous souls seek oblivion of life in religious excitement. It is a mental and moral mixture of opium and alcohol extremely soothing to the bruised consciousness, a gentle diversion in common-place cares that poor humanity must not be begrudged; though, as George Eliot has finely said, it is proof of strength to live and do well without this narcotic. The return to Ireland coincides with the outbreak of the Franco-German war. A mist hangs over those terrible months, but Dublin I remember was French to a man. Every morning my eldest sister marched us off to mass to pray for the French, and we wept profusely over each tragic telegram. Our hero Edmond was over there, fighting and lying with equal gallantry. Several noble dames had tended his wounds and offered to marry him, and he escaped from prison with the assistance of the jailer's daughter, who loved him despairingly. I recall our awed inspection of several helmets and swords brought back from the war by a quantity of heroic young Irishmen who professed to have laid the Germans low on countless occasions. I do not now know what they did out there, for there is always a great deal of Tartarin, an atmosphere of Tarascon, about the Irishman returned from abroad. But we all went down in a glorified body, dressed in our very best, to assist at the arrival of Marshal M'Mahon and his wife, who came all the way from far-off France to thank us for what they had or had not done. Here, at the age of twelve, my childhood ends, and youth, troubled youth, begins. * * * * * * * * To stand upon the hill-top and cast a glance of retrospection down the long path travelled in all its excess of light and shadow; impenetrable darkness massed against a luminous haze through which rays of blazing glory filter, each one striking upon memory in a shock of prismatic hues, until the eye reaches as far back as the start from the valley,--how astonished we are at the unevenness of the road! So brilliant, so ineffectual for most of us, is this dear thing called Youth! The uneasy flutter from the nest, the wild throb of pulses, now for ever tamed, at each sharp encounter with fate; the courage, the hope, the passion--alas! how futile and how sad to eyes in middle life that see the inexorable word "failure" written across that splendid tear-blotted page of strife, of yearning, of frailty and endeavour. Seen from the hill-top, how small the big stones are that broke our path! How easy it might have been to skirt the thorn-bushes and brambles, instead of tearing an impulsive way through them, and falling so repeatedly on bleeding face and hands!