g before themselves that
belongs to those who strike the popular imagination.

Sometimes my grandmother would bring me to see some old Sligo gentlewoman
whose garden ran down to the river, ending there in a low wall full of
wallflowers, and I would sit up upon my chair, very bored, while my elders
ate their seed-cake and drank their sherry. My walks with the servants
were more interesting; sometimes we would pass a little fat girl and a
servant persuaded me to write her a love-letter, and the next time she
passed she put her tongue out. But it was the servant's stories that
interested me. At such and such a corner a man had got a shilling from a
drill sergeant by standing in a barrel and had then rolled out of it and
shown his crippled legs. And in such and such a house an old woman had hid
herself under the bed of her guests, an officer and his wife, and on
hearing them abuse her, beaten them with a broomstick. All the well-known
families had their grotesque or tragic or romantic legends, and I often
said to myself how terrible it would be to go away and die where nobody
would know my story. Years afterwards, when I was ten or twelve years old
and in London, I would remember Sligo with tears, and when I began to
write, it was there I hoped to find my audience. Next to Merville where I
lived, was another tree-surrounded house where I sometimes went to see a
little boy who stayed there occasionally with his grandmother, whose name
I forget and who seemed to me kind and friendly, though when I went to see
her in my thirteenth or fourteenth year I discovered that she only cared
for very little boys. When the visitors called I hid in the hay-loft and
lay hidden behind the great heap of hay while a servant was calling my
name in the yard.

I do not know how old I was (for all these events seem at the same
distance) when I was made drunk. I had been out yachting with an uncle and
my cousins and it had come on very rough. I had lain on deck between the
mast and the bowsprit and a wave had burst over me and I had seen green
water over my head. I was very proud and very wet. When we got into Rosses
again, I was dressed up in an older boy's clothes so that the trousers
came down below my boots and a pilot gave me a little raw whiskey. I drove
home with the uncle on an outside car and was so pleased with the strange
state in which I found myself that for all my uncle could do, I cried to
every passer-by that I was drunk, and went