and for the Saints." My friend was not interested in
passion. A woman drew him to her by some romantic singularity in her
beauty or her circumstance, and drew him the more if the curiosity she
aroused were half intellectual. A little after the time I write of,
throwing himself into my chair after some visit to a music-hall or
hippodrome, he began, "O, Yeats, I was never in love with a
serpent-charmer before." He was objective. For him "the visible world
existed" as he was fond of quoting, and I suspect him of a Moon that had
entered its fourth quarter.

XVIII

At first I used to stay with Macgregor Mathers and his gracious young wife
near the Champ de Mars, or in the Rue Mozart, but later by myself in a
student's hotel in the Latin quarter, and I cannot remember always where I
stayed when this or that event took place. Macgregor Mathers, or
Macgregor, for he had now shed the "Mathers," would come down to breakfast
one day with his Horace, the next day with his Macpherson's Ossian, and
read out fragments during breakfast, considering both books of equal
authenticity. Once when I questioned that of Ossian, he got into a
rage--what right had I to take sides with the English enemy--and I found
that for him the eighteenth century controversy still raged. At night he
would dress himself in Highland dress, and dance the sword dance, and his
mind brooded upon the ramifications of clans and tartans. Yet I have at
moments doubted whether he had seen the Highlands, or even, until invited
there by some White Rose Society, Scotland itself. Every Sunday he gave to
the evocation of Spirits, and I noted that upon that day he would spit
blood. That did not matter, he said, because it came from his head, not
his lungs; what ailed him I do not know, but I think that he lived under
some great strain, and presently I noted that he was drinking neat brandy,
not to drunkenness, but to detriment of mind and body.

He began to foresee changes in the world, announcing in 1893 or 1894, the
imminence of immense wars, and was it in 1895 or 1896 that he learned
ambulance work, and made others learn it? He had a sabre wound on his
wrist--or perhaps his forehead, for my memory is not clear--got in some
student riot that he had mistaken for the beginning of war. It may have
been some talk of his that made me write the poem that begins:

"The dews drop slowly and dreams gather;
unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream awakened