er had been a king I did not
doubt it. I was sitting against the hedge and iron railing of some
villa-garden there, when I heard one boy say to another it was something
wrong with my liver that gave me such a dark complexion and that I could
not live more than a year. I said to myself a year is a very long time,
one can do such a lot of things in a year, and put it out of my head. When
my father gave me a holiday and later when I had a holiday from school I
took my schooner boat to the round pond, sailing it very commonly against
the two cutter yachts of an old naval officer. He would sometimes look at
the ducks and say, "I would like to take that fellow home for my dinner,"
and he sang me a sailor's song about a coffin ship which left Sligo after
the great famine, that made me feel very important. The servants at Sligo
had told me the story. When she was moved from the berth she had lain in,
an unknown dead man's body had floated up, a very evil omen; and my
grandfather, who was Lloyds' agent, had condemned her, but she slipped out
in the night. The pond had its own legends; and a boy who had seen a
certain model steamer "burned to the water's edge" was greatly valued as a
friend. There was a little boy I was kind to because I knew his father had
done something disgraceful, though I did not know what. It was years
before I discovered that his father was but the maker of certain popular
statues, many of which are now in public places. I had heard my father's
friends speak of him. Sometimes my sister came with me, and we would look
into all the sweet shops & toy shops on our way home, especially into one
opposite Holland House because there was a cutter yacht made of sugar in
the window, and we drank at all the fountains. Once a stranger spoke to us
and bought us sweets and came with us almost to our door. We asked him to
come in and told him our father's name. He would not come in, but laughed
and said, "Oh, that is the painter who scrapes out every day what he
painted the day before." A poignant memory came upon me the other day
while I was passing the drinking-fountain near Holland Park, for there I
and my sister had spoken together of our longing for Sligo and our hatred
of London. I know we were both very close to tears and remember with
wonder, for I had never known anyone that cared for such momentoes, that I
longed for a sod of earth from some field I knew, something of Sligo to
hold in my hand. It was some old race