eard many tales of changelings, grown men and
women as well as children, who as the people believe are taken by the
fairies, some spirit or inanimate object bewitched into their likeness
remaining in their stead, and I constantly asked myself what reality there
could be in these tales, often supported by so much testimony. I woke one
night to find myself lying upon my back with all my limbs rigid, and to
hear a ceremonial measured voice which did not seem to be mine speaking
through my lips, "We make an image of him who sleeps," it said, "and it is
not him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel." After many years that
thought, others often found as strangely being added to it, became the
thought of the Mask, which I have used in these memoirs to explain men's
characters. A few months ago at Oxford I was asking myself why it should
be "An image of him who sleeps," and took down from the shelf not knowing
why I was doing so, a book which I had never read, Burkitt's _Early
Eastern Christianity_, and opened it at random. My eyes lit upon a passage
from a Gnostic Hymn telling how a certain King's son being exiled, slept
in Egypt, a symbol of the natural state, and while he slept an Angel
brought him a royal mantle; and at the bottom of the page I found a
footnote saying that the word mantle did not represent the meaning
properly for that which the Angel gave had the exile's own form and
likeness. I did not, however, find in the Gnostic Hymn my other thought
that Egypt and that which the Mask represents are antithetical. That, I
think, became clear, though I had had some premonitions when a countryman
told Lady Gregory and myself that he had heard the crying of new-dropped
lambs in November--Spring in the world of Fairy, being November with us.

* * * * *

On the sea coast at Duras, a few miles from Coole, an old French Count,
Florimond de Bastero, lived for certain months in every year. Lady Gregory
and I talked over my project of an Irish Theatre looking out upon the lawn
of his house, watching a large flock of ducks that was always gathered for
his arrival from Paris, and that would be a very small flock, if indeed it
were a flock at all, when he set out for Rome in the autumn. I told her
that I had given up my project because it was impossible to get the few
pounds necessary for a start in little halls, and she promised to collect
or give the money necessary. That was her first great service to