room by myself. But I was
always afraid of my uncles and aunts, and once the uncle who had taken the
crowbar to the bully found me eating lunch which my grandmother had given
me and reproved me for it and made me ashamed. We breakfasted at nine and
dined at four and it was considered self-indulgent to eat anything
between meals; and once an aunt told me that I had reined in my pony and
struck it at the same moment that I might show it off as I rode through
the town, and I, because I had been accused of what I thought a very dark
crime, had a night of misery. Indeed I remember little of childhood but
its pain. I have grown happier with every year of life as though gradually
conquering something in myself, for certainly my miseries were not made by
others but were a part of my own mind.

II

One day someone spoke to me of the voice of the conscience, and as I
brooded over the phrase I came to think that my soul, because I did not
hear an articulate voice, was lost. I had some wretched days until being
alone with one of my aunts I heard a whisper in my ear, "what a tease you
are!" At first I thought my aunt must have spoken, but when I found she
had not, I concluded it was the voice of my conscience and was happy
again. From that day the voice has come to me at moments of crisis, but
now it is a voice in my head that is sudden and startling. It does not
tell me what to do, but often reproves me. It will say perhaps, "that is
unjust" of some thought; and once when I complained that a prayer had not
been heard, it said, "you have been helped." I had a little flagstaff in
front of the house and a red flag with the Union Jack in the corner. Every
night I pulled my flag down and folded it up and laid it on a shelf in my
bedroom, and one morning before breakfast I found it, though I knew I had
folded it up the night before, knotted round the bottom of the flagstaff
so that it was touching the grass. I must have heard the servants talking
of the faeries for I concluded at once that a faery had tied those four
knots and from that on believed that one had whispered in my ear. I have
been told, though I do not remember it myself, that I saw, whether once or
many times I do not know, a supernatural bird in the corner of the room.
Once too I was driving with my grandmother a little after dark close to
the Channel that runs for some five miles from Sligo to the sea, and my
grandmother showed me the red light of an outward-bound steam