smoke, but to contribute the amount so saved weekly to the Irish Cause.

* * * * *

VI

A few months before I was drawn into politics, I made a friendship that
was to make possible that old project of an Irish Theatre. Arthur Symons
and I were staying at Tillyra Castle in County Galway with Mr. Edward
Martyn, when Lady Gregory, whom I had met once in London for a few minutes
drove over, and after Symon's return to London I stayed at her house,
which is some four miles from Tillyra. I was in poor health, the strain
of youth had been greater than it commonly is, even with imaginative men,
who must always, I think, find youth bitter, and I had lost myself besides
as I had done periodically for years, upon _Hodos Camelionis_. The first
time was in my eighteenth or nineteenth years, when I tried to create a
more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had got there through a novel
that I could neither write nor cease to write which had _Hodos Camelionis_
for its theme. My chief person was to see all the modern visionary sects
pass before his bewildered eyes, as Flaubert's St. Anthony saw the
Christian sects, and I was as helpless to create artistic, as my chief
person to create philosophic order. It was not that I do not love order,
or that I lack capacity for it, but that--and not in the arts and in
thought only--I outrun my strength. It is not so much that I choose too
many elements, as that the possible unities themselves seem without
number, like those angels, that in Henry More's paraphrase of the
Schoolman's problem, dance spurred and booted upon the point of a needle.
Perhaps fifty years ago I had been in less trouble, but what can one do
when the age itself has come to _Hodos Camelionis_?

Lady Gregory seeing that I was ill brought me from cottage to cottage to
gather folk-belief, tales of the fairies, and the like, and wrote down
herself what we had gathered, considering that this work, in which one let
others talk, and walked about the fields so much, would lie, to use a
country phrase, "Very light upon the mind." She asked me to return there
the next year, and for years to come I was to spend my summers at her
house. When I was in good health again, I found myself indolent, partly
perhaps because I was affrighted by that impossible novel, and asked her
to send me to my work every day at eleven, and at some other hour to my
letters, rating me with idleness if need be, and I doubt