on crying it through the town
and everywhere until I was put to bed by my grandmother and given
something to drink that tasted of black currants and so fell asleep.

III

Some six miles off towards Ben Bulben and beyond the Channel, as we call
the tidal river between Sligo and the Rosses, and on top of a hill there
was a little square two-storeyed house covered with creepers and looking
out upon a garden where the box borders were larger than any I had ever
seen, and where I saw for the first time the crimson streak of the
gladiolus and awaited its blossom with excitement. Under one gable a dark
thicket of small trees made a shut-in mysterious place, where one played
and believed that something was going to happen. My great-aunt Micky lived
there. Micky was not her right name for she was Mary Yeats and her father
had been my great-grandfather, John Yeats, who had been Rector of
Drumcliffe, a few miles further off, and died in 1847. She was a spare,
high-coloured, elderly woman and had the oldest looking cat I had ever
seen, for its hair had grown into matted locks of yellowy white. She
farmed and had one old man-servant, but could not have farmed at all, had
not neighbouring farmers helped to gather in the crops, in return for the
loan of her farm implements and "out of respect for the family," for as
Johnny MacGurk, the Sligo barber said to me, "the Yeats's were always very
respectable." She was full of family history; all her dinner knives were
pointed like daggers through much cleaning, and there was a little James
the First cream-jug with the Yeats motto and crest, and on her dining-room
mantle-piece a beautiful silver cup that had belonged to my
great-great-grandfather, who had married a certain Mary Butler. It had
upon it the Butler crest and had been already old at the date 1534, when
the initials of some bride and bridegroom were engraved under the lip. All
its history for generations was rolled up inside it upon a piece of paper
yellow with age, until some caller took the paper to light his pipe.
Another family of Yeats, a widow and her two children on whom I called
sometimes with my grandmother, lived near in a long low cottage, and owned
a very fierce turkeycock that did battle with their visitors; and some
miles away lived the secretary to the Grand Jury and Land Agent, my
great-uncle Mat Yeats and his big family of boys and girls; but I think
it was only in later years that I came to know them well. I do