my life to those who had power in Ireland or
with those anywhere that were good servants and poor bargainers, but I
cared nothing as a child for Micky's tales. I could see my grandfather's
ships come up the bay or the river, and his sailors treated me with
deference, and a ship's carpenter made and mended my toy boats and I
thought that nobody could be so important as my grandfather. Perhaps, too,
it is only now that I can value those more gentle natures so unlike his
passion and violence. An old Sligo priest has told me how my
great-grandfather John Yeats always went into his kitchen rattling the
keys, so much did he fear finding some one doing wrong, and how when the
agent of the great landowner of his parish brought him from cottage to
cottage to bid the women send their children to the Protestant school and
all had promised till they came to one who cried, "child of mine will
never darken your door," he had said "thank you, my woman, you are the
first honest woman I have met to-day." My uncle, Mat Yeats, the Land
Agent, had once waited up every night for a week to catch some boys who
stole his apples and when he caught them had given them sixpence and told
them not to do it again. Perhaps it is only fancy or the softening touch
of the miniaturist that makes me discover in their faces some courtesy and
much gentleness. Two 18th century faces interest me the most, one that of
a great-great-grandfather, for both have under their powdered curling wigs
a half-feminine charm, and as I look at them I discover a something clumsy
and heavy in myself. Yet it was a Yeats who spoke the only eulogy that
turns my head. "We have ideas and no passions, but by marriage with a
Pollexfen we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs."

Among the miniatures there is a larger picture, an admirable drawing by I
know not what master, that is too harsh and merry for its company. He was
a connection and close friend of my great-grandmother Corbet, and though
we spoke of him as "Uncle Beattie" in our childhood, no blood relation. My
great-grandmother who died at ninety-three had many memories of him. He
was the friend of Goldsmith & was accustomed to boast, clergyman though he
was, that he belonged to a hunt-club of which every member but himself had
been hanged or transported for treason, and that it was not possible to
ask him a question he could not reply to with a perfectly appropriate
blasphemy or indecency.

IV

Because I had found it h