being blown away--he used to wear a grey beaver hat. The great event of that time was the day that we went to Ballyglass, not to see the coach go by, but to get into it, for in those days the railway stopped at Athenry. And that was the day I saw the canal, and heard with astonishment that there was a time long ago, no doubt in my father's youth, when people used to go to Dublin in a barge. Those memories were like a stupor, and awaking suddenly I saw that more than two and a half miles lay between me and my mother. In half an hour more I should know whether she were alive or dead, and I watched the horse trotting, interested in his shambling gait, or not at all interested in it--I do not know which. On occasions of great nervous tension one observes everything.... Everything I remembered best appeared with mechanical regularity; now it was a wood, a while afterward somebody's farmyard, later on a line of cottages, another wood, one of my own gate lodges. An old sawyer lived in it now--looking after it for me; and I hoped that the wheels of the car would not bring him out, for it would distress me to see him. The firs in the low-lying land had grown a little within the last thirty years, but not much. We came to the bridge; we left it behind us; the gate lodge and the drive from it; the plantation that I knew so well, the lilac bushes, the laburnums--good Heavens! How terrible was all this resurrection! Mists hide the mountains from us, the present hides the past; but there are times when the present does not exist at all, when every mist is cleared away, and the past confronts us in naked outline, and that perhaps is why it is so painful to me to return home. The little hill at the beginning of the drive is but a little hill, but to me it is much more, so intimately is it associated with all the pains and troubles of childhood. All this park was once a fairyland to me; now it is but a thin reality, a book which I have read, and the very thought of which bores me, so well do I know it. There is the lilac bush! I used to go there with my mother thirty years ago at this time of year, and we used to come home with our hands full of bloom. Two more turnings and we should be within sight of the house! This is how men feel when condemned to death. I am sure of it. At the last hill the driver allowed his horse to fall into a walk, but I begged of him to drive on the horse, for I saw some peasants about the steps of the hall door; they were waiting, no doubt, for news, or perhaps they had news. "We have bad news for you," they cried in the wailing tones of the West.