That, I suppose, is pure nonsense, yet the magic was there. Before and after the cow made her amazing leap the stuff was a mere jingle: it was the word “Moon” that brought up the picture: and I saw the white, docile beast, suddenly transformed, pricked by the sting of midsummer madness, with lowered head and curling horns, poised for flight, for the wonderful upward leap, while a monstrous, glowing moon hung like a great scarlet Chinese lantern in the clouds, low against a black night. At this time I had few books I cared for, but as I grew older, and my powers of understanding increased, I found more, for up at Derryaghy House was a whole library in which I might rummage without any other interference than that my father could exercise from a distance. Sometimes when I brought a book home which he did not approve of, he would send me back with it; but if I had begun it I always finished it. I had made this a rule; though, on the other hand, if I had not begun it, I let my father have his way. Everything connected with the East had a deep attraction for me――or, shall I say, what I imagined the East to be――a country of magicians and mysterious talismans, of crouching Sphinxes and wonderful gardens. I delighted in the more marvellous stories in the “Arabian Nights,” and I regretted infinitely that life was really not like that. To go for a walk and fall straightway on some wonderful adventure, that was what I should have loved. I remember poring over a big folio of photographs of Eastern monuments. Those mystical, winged beasts with human heads, in their attitude of eternal waiting and listening, touched some chord in my imagination: they had that strangeness which I adored, and at the same time they had an odd familiarity. I appeared to remember――but, oh, so dimly!――having seen them before, not in pictures, but under a hot, heavy, languid sun, long, long ago. The luxuriousness, the softness and sleepy charm of the Asiatic temper――I had something in common with it, I could understand it. The melodious singing of a voice through the cool twilight; the notes of a lute dying slowly into silence; another voice, low and clear and musical, reading from the “Koran”――where had I heard all that? I pictured great coloured bazaars, where grave merchants with long white beards sat cross-legged and silent, where beautiful, naked, golden-skinned slaves stood waiting for a purchaser, where you could buy silken carpets that would carry you over the world, and black, ebony horses, swifter than light. * * * * *