was still unbroken, had made the first attack upon academic form.
He no longer read me anything for its story, and all our discussion was of
style.

XVI

I began to make blunders when I paid calls or visits, and a woman I had
known and liked as a child told me I had changed for the worse. I had
wanted to be wise and eloquent, an essay on the younger Ampere had helped
me to this ambition, and when I was alone I exaggerated my blunders and
was miserable. I had begun to write poetry in imitation of Shelley and of
Edmund Spenser, play after play--for my father exalted dramatic poetry
above all other kinds--and I invented fantastic and incoherent plots. My
lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the
books, although there were many lines that taken by themselves had music.
I spoke them slowly as I wrote and only discovered when I read them to
somebody else that there was no common music, no prosody. There were,
however, moments of observation; for, even when I caught moths no longer,
I still noticed all that passed; how the little moths came out at sunset,
and how after that there were only a few big moths till dawn brought
little moths again; and what birds cried out at night as if in their
sleep.

XVII

At Sligo, where I still went for my holidays, I stayed with my uncle,
George Pollexfen, who had come from Ballina to fill the place of my
grandfather, who had retired. My grandfather had no longer his big house,
his partner William Middleton was dead, and there had been legal trouble.
He was no longer the rich man he had been, and his sons and daughters were
married and scattered. He had a tall, bare house overlooking the harbour,
and had nothing to do but work himself into a rage if he saw a mudlighter
mismanaged or judged from the smoke of a steamer that she was burning
cheap coal, and to superintend the making of his tomb. There was a
Middleton tomb and a long list of Middletons on the wall, and an almost
empty place for Pollexfen names, but he had said, because there was a
Middleton there he did not like, "I am not going to lie with those old
bones;" and already one saw his name in large gilt letters on the stone
fence of the new tomb. He ended his walk at St. John's churchyard almost
daily, for he liked everything neat and compendious as upon shipboard, and
if he had not looked after the tomb himself the builder might have added
some useless ornament. He had, however, all his old ski