The morning was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and I used to catch myself thinking out a picturesque expression to describe it. It seemed to me that the earth might be compared to an egg, it looked so warm under the white sky, and the sky was as soft as the breast feathers of a dove. This sudden bow-wowing of the literary skeleton made me feel that I wanted to kick myself. Nature has forgotten to provide us with a third leg whereby we may revenge ourselves on instincts that we cannot control. A moment afterward I found myself plunged in reflections regarding the impossibility of keeping one's thoughts fixed on any one subject for any considerable length of time. At the end of these reflections I fell back, wondering, again asking if I were really destined to watch by my mother's death-bed. That day I seemed to become a sheer mentality, a sort of buzz of thought, and I could think of myself only as of a fly climbing a glass dome. It seemed to me that I was like a fly climbing and falling back, buzzing, and climbing again. "Never," I said to myself, "have I been more than a fly buzzing in a glass dome. And, good Lord, who made the glass dome?" How often did I ask myself that question, and why it was made, and if it were going to endure for ever! In such sore perplexity of mind questions from anybody would be intolerable, and I shrank back into the corner of the carriage whenever a passer-by reminded me, however vaguely, of anybody I had ever known; the mental strain increased mile after mile, for the names of the stations grew more familiar. I began to try to remember how many there were before we arrived at Claremorris, the station at which I was going to get out. Half an hour afterward the train slackened, the porter cried out "Ballyhaunis." The next would be Claremorris, and I watched every field, foreseeing the long road, myself on one side of the car, the driver on the other; a two hours' drive in silence or in talk--in talk, for I should have to tell him my errand.... He might be able to tell me about my mother, if the news of her illness had got as far as Claremorris. At the public-house where I went to get a car I made inquiries, but nothing was known. My mother must have fallen ill suddenly--of what? I had not heard she was ailing; I did not remember her ever to have been ill. At that moment some trees reminded me that we were close to Ballyglass, and my thoughts wandered away to the long road on the other side of the hill, and I saw there (for do we not often see things in memory as plainly as if they were before us?) the two cream-coloured ponies, Ivory and Primrose, she used to drive, and the phaeton, and myself in it, a little child in frocks, anxious, above all things, to see the mail-coach go by. A great sight it was to see it go by with mail-bags and luggage, the guard blowing a horn, the horses trotting splendidly, the lengthy reins swinging, and the driver, his head leaned a little on one side to save his hat from