lness against his gloom over the
breakfast table, maintaining that neither his talent nor his memory nor
his health were running to the dregs, he would rout me with the sentence,
"how very old I shall be in twenty years." Yet this inactive man, in whom
the sap of life seemed to be dried away, had a mind full of pictures.
Nothing had ever happened to him except a love affair, not I think very
passionate, that had gone wrong, and a voyage when a young man. My
grandfather had sent him in a schooner to a port in Spain where the
shipping agents were two Spaniards called O'Neill, descendants of Hugh
O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who had fled from Ireland in the reign of James
I; and their Irish trade was a last remnant of the Spanish trade that had
once made Galway wealthy. For some years he and they had corresponded, for
they cherished the memory of their origin. In some Connaught burying
ground, he had chanced upon the funeral of a child with but one mourner, a
distinguished foreign-looking man. It was an Austrian count burying the
last of an Irish family, long nobles of Austria, who were always carried
to that half-ruined burying ground.

My uncle had almost given up hunting and was soon to give it up
altogether, and he had once ridden steeple-chases and been, his
horse-trainer said, the best rider in Connaught. He had certainly great
knowledge of horses, for I have been told, several counties away, that at
Ballina he cured horses by conjuring. He had, however, merely great skill
in diagnosis, for the day was still far off when he was to give his nights
to astrology and ceremonial magic. His servant, Mary Battle, who had been
with him since he was a young man, had the second sight and that, maybe,
inclined him to strange studies. He would tell how more than once when he
had brought home a guest without giving her notice he had found the
dinner-table set for two, and one morning she was about to bring him a
clean shirt, but stopped saying there was blood on the shirt-front and
that she must bring him another. On his way to his office he fell,
crossing over a little wall, and cut himself and bled on to the linen
where she had seen the blood. In the evening, she told how surprised she
had been to find when she looked again that the shirt she had thought
bloody was quite clean. She could neither read nor write and her mind,
which answered his gloom with its merriment, was rammed with every sort of
old history and strange belief. Muc