n Dowden's drawing-room a servant announced my late
head-master. I must have got pale or red, for Dowden, with some ironical,
friendly remark, brought me into another room and there I stayed until the
visitor was gone. A few months later, when I met the head-master again I
had more courage. We chanced upon one another in the street and he said,
"I want you to use your influence with so-and-so, for he is giving all his
time to some sort of mysticism and he will fail in his examination." I
was in great alarm, but I managed to say something about the children of
this world being wiser than the children of light. He went off with a
brusque "good morning." I do not think that even at that age I would have
been so grandiloquent but for my alarm. He had, however, aroused all my
indignation.

My new allies and my old had alike sustained me. "Intermediate
examinations," which I had always refused, meant money for pupil and for
teacher, and that alone. My father had brought me up never when at school
to think of the future or of any practical result. I have even known him
to say, "when I was young, the definition of a gentleman was a man not
wholly occupied in getting on." And yet this master wanted to withdraw my
friend from the pursuit of the most important of all the truths. My
friend, now in his last year at school, was a show boy, and had beaten all
Ireland again and again, but now he and I were reading Baron Reichenbach
on Odic Force and manuals published by the Theosophical Society. We spent
a good deal of time in the Kildare Street Museum passing our hands over
the glass cases, feeling or believing we felt the Odic Force flowing from
the big crystals. We also found pins blindfolded and read papers on our
discoveries to the Hermetic Society that met near the roof in York
Street. I had, when we first made our society, proposed for our
consideration that whatever the great poets had affirmed in their finest
moments was the nearest we could come to an authoritative religion, and
that their mythology, their spirits of water and wind were but literal
truth. I had read "Prometheus Unbound" with this thought in mind and
wanted help to carry my study through all literature. I was soon to vex my
father by defining truth as "the dramatically appropriate utterance of the
highest man." And if I had been asked to define the "highest" man, I would
have said perhaps, "we can but find him as Homer found Odysseus when he
was looking for a t