st as panic fell upon me, that it was merely an irritable cow.
I braved Taylor again and again, but always found him worse than my
expectation. I would say, quoting Mill, "oratory is heard, poetry is
overheard." And he would answer, his voice full of contempt, that there
was always an audience; and yet, in his moments of lofty speech, he
himself was alone no matter what the crowd.

At other times his science or his Catholic orthodoxy, I never could
discover which, would become enraged with my supernaturalism. I can but
once remember escaping him unabashed and unconquered. I said with
deliberate exaggeration at some evening party at O'Leary's "five out of
every six people have seen a ghost;" and Taylor fell into my net with
"well, I will ask everybody here." I managed that the first answer should
come from a man who had heard a voice he believed to be that of his dead
brother, and the second from a doctor's wife who had lived in a haunted
house and met a man with his throat cut, whose throat as he drifted along
the garden-walk "had opened and closed like the mouth of a fish." Taylor
threw up his head like an angry horse, but asked no further question, and
did not return to the subject that evening. If he had gone on he would
have heard from everybody some like story though not all at first hand,
and Miss O'Leary would have told him what happened at the death of one of
the MacManus brothers, well known in the politics of Young Ireland. One
brother was watching by the bed where the other lay dying and saw a
strange hawk-like bird fly through the open window and alight upon the
breast of the dying man. He did not dare to drive it away and it remained
there, as it seemed, looking into his brother's eyes until death came, and
then it flew out of the window. I think, though I am not sure, that she
had the story from the watcher himself.

It was understood that Taylor's temper kept him from public life, though
he may have been the greatest orator of his time, partly because no leader
would accept him, and still more because, in the words of one of his
Dublin enemies, "he had never joined any party and as soon as one joined
him he seceded." With O'Leary he was always, even when they differed, as
they often did, gentle and deferential, but once only, and that was years
afterwards, did I think that he was about to include me among his friends.
We met by chance in a London street and he stopped me with an abrupt
movement: "Yeats,"