ll and nerve. I was
going to Rosses Point on the little trading steamer and saw him take the
wheel from the helmsman and steer her through a gap in the channel wall,
and across the sand, an unheard-of-course, and at the journey's end bring
her alongside her wharf at Rosses without the accustomed zigzagging or
pulling on a rope but in a single movement. He took snuff when he had a
cold, but had never smoked or taken alcohol; and when in his eightieth
year his doctor advised a stimulant, he replied, "no, no, I am not going
to form a bad habit."

My brother had partly taken my place in my grandmother's affections. He
had lived permanently in her house for some years now, and went to a Sligo
school where he was always bottom of his class. My grandmother did not
mind that, for she said, "he is too kind-hearted to pass the other boys."
He spent his free hours going here and there with crowds of little boys,
sons of pilots and sailors, as their well-liked leader, arranging donkey
races or driving donkeys tandem, an occupation which requires all one's
intellect because of their obstinacy. Besides he had begun to amuse
everybody with his drawings; and in half the pictures he paints to-day I
recognise faces that I have met at Rosses or the Sligo quays. It is long
since he has lived there, but his memory seems as accurate as the sight of
the eye.

George Pollexfen was as patient as his father was impetuous, and did all
by habit. A well-to-do, elderly man, he lived with no more comfort than
when he had set out as a young man. He had a little house and one old
general servant and a man to look after his horse, and every year he gave
up some activity and found that there was one more food that disagreed
with him. A hypochondriac, he passed from winter to summer through a
series of woollens that had always to be weighed; for in April or May or
whatever the date was he had to be sure he carried the exact number of
ounces he had carried upon that date since boyhood. He lived in
despondency, finding in the most cheerful news reasons of discouragement,
and sighing every twenty-second of June over the shortening of the days.
Once in later years, when I met him in Dublin sweating in a midsummer
noon, I brought him into the hall of the Kildare Street Library, a cool
and shady place, without lightening his spirits; for he but said in a
melancholy voice, "how very cold this place must be in winter time."
Sometimes when I had pitted my cheerfu