When I left school I entered Trinity College, and for the next four or five years the man most dominant in my life was my uncle Robert Corbet. I think of my poor uncle as a man of generous impulses who lived up to his creed of being a gentleman, a worldling and a club man, nor did he forget that he was a citizen of Dublin, of the type that flourished in the eighteenth century. If he suspected his Catholic neighbours, all the same he liked them; and if he had a certain respect for Englishmen, no less he disliked them. Before I was born, he bought or leased, I never knew which it was, Sandymount Castle, and then began creating all around him beautiful gardens. Of business he knew little or nothing, and probably neglected it, but he did not neglect his gardens. Every morning he rose early, and would wander all over the grounds, sometimes with a small saw and hatchet, making among the trees what he called 'vistas.' He employed four or five gardeners, and as long as I knew Sandymount Castle, none of these men ever left him and no one ever interfered with them. So treated, they were gentle, pleasant and diligent, and the gardens were lovely. There was a piece of water called the 'pond' on which we boys did much boating, and there were plenty of wild ducks and swans, and there was also an island on which was a one-roomed thatched cottage, in which was a collection of souvenirs and relics brought back from India and the Colonies by my uncle's brothers who had all been soldiers. Outside the cottage were two chained eagles. As a child I feared these eagles, and when I was a man they were there still, and when my uncle, an old man, left Sandymount for good, they were sent to the Zoological gardens, where for all I know they may still shriek and flap their wings as was their habit on the Island. In and about Sandymount Castle were various relics of departed worthies, among them a wicked looking sword with a very long handle which my uncle Pat had wrested from an enemy when leading the Forlorn Hope at the taking of Rangoon. This uncle became Governor of Penang. All these things have disappeared and no one remembers them but myself, and I mention them now, not because I think they're likely to interest anybody, but because I think it will please my old uncle to know that I have done so.