lway. He had a good deal of pride and disliked his
neighbours, whereas his wife, a Middleton, was gentle and patient and did
many charities in the little back parlour among frieze coats and shawled
heads, and every night when she saw him asleep went the round of the house
alone with a candle to make certain there was no burglar in danger of the
hatchet. She was a true lover of her garden and before the care of her
house had grown upon her, would choose some favourite among her flowers
and copy it upon rice-paper. I saw some of her handiwork the other day and
I wondered at the delicacy of form and colour and at a handling that may
have needed a magnifying glass it was so minute. I can remember no other
pictures but the Chinese paintings, and some coloured prints of battles in
the Crimea upon the wall of a passage, and the painting of a ship at the
passage end darkened by time.

My grown-up uncles and aunts, my grandfather's many sons and daughters,
came and went, and almost all they said or did has faded from my memory,
except a few harsh words that convince me by a vividness out of proportion
to their harshness that all were habitually kind and considerate. The
youngest of my uncles was stout and humorous and had a tongue of leather
over the keyhole of his door to keep the draught out, and another whose
bedroom was at the end of a long stone passage had a model turret ship in
a glass case. He was a clever man and had designed the Sligo quays, but
was now going mad and inventing a vessel of war that could not be sunk,
his pamphlet explained, because of a hull of solid wood. Only six months
ago my sister awoke dreaming that she held a wingless sea-bird in her arms
and presently she heard that he had died in his mad-house, for a sea-bird
is the omen that announces the death or danger of a Pollexfen. An uncle,
George Pollexfen, afterwards astrologer and mystic, and my dear friend,
came but seldom from Ballina, once to a race meeting with two postillions
dressed in green; and there was that younger uncle who had sent me for the
railway-pass. He was my grandmother's favourite, and had, the servants
told me, been sent away from school for taking a crowbar to a bully.

I can only remember my grandmother punishing me once. I was playing in the
kitchen and a servant in horseplay pulled my shirt out of my trousers in
front just as my grandmother came in and I, accused of I knew not what
childish indecency, was given my dinner in a