This is all the old men told me, and when I think of their speech and of their silence, of their coming and of their going, I am almost persuaded that had I gone out of the house after they had gone out of it, I should have found no footsteps on the snow. They may, for all I or any man can say, have been themselves immortals: immortal demons, come to put an untrue story into my mind for some purpose I do not understand. Whatever they were, I have turned into a pathway which will lead me from them and from the Order of the Alchemical Rose. I no longer live an elaborate and haughty life, but seek to lose myself among the prayers and the sorrows of the multitude. I pray best in poor chapels, where the frieze coats brush by me as I kneel, and when I pray against the demons I repeat a prayer which was made I know not how many centuries ago to help some poor Gaelic man or woman who had suffered with a suffering like mine. _Seacht b-pàidreacha fó seacht Chuir Muire faoi n-a Mac, Chuir Brighid faoi n-a brat, Chuir Dia faoi n-a neart, Eidir sinn ‘san Sluagh Sidhe, Eidir sinn ‘san Sluagh Gaoith._ Seven paters seven times, Send Mary by her Son, Send Bridget by her mantle, Send God by His strength, Between us and the faery host, Between us and the demons of the air. JOHN SHERMAN AND DHOYA: TWO EARLY STORIES _Republished by kind permission of Mr. T. Fisher Unwin._ Having been persuaded somewhat against my judgment to include these early stories, I have read them for the first time these many years. They have come to interest me very deeply; for I am something of an astrologer, and can see in them a young man--was I twenty-three? and we Irish ripen slowly--born when the Water-Carrier was on the horizon, at pains to overcome Saturn in Saturn’s hour, just as I can see in much that follows his struggle with the still all-too-unconquered Moon, and at last, as I think, the summons of the prouder Sun. Sligo, where I had lived as a child and spent some months or weeks of every year till long after, is Ballah, and Pool Dhoya is at the river mouth there, and he who gave me all of Sherman that was not born at the rising of the Water-Carrier has still the bronze upon his face, and is at this moment, it may be, in his walled garden, wondering, as he did twenty years ago, whether he will ever mend the broken glass of the conservatory, where I am not too young to recollect the vine-trees and grapes that did not ripen. W. B. YEATS. _November 14th, 1907._ JOHN SHERMAN FIRST PART JOHN SHERMAN LEAVES BALLAH I