ntain and spread it out over the sand and that would give you acres of
good fields." At Sligo there is a wide river mouth and at ebb tide most of
it is dry sand, but all Sligo knew that in some way I cannot remember it
was the spreading of the tide over the sand that left the narrow channel
fit for shipping. At any rate the carman had gone chuckling all over Sligo
with his tale. People would tell it to prove that Englishmen were always
grumbling. "They grumble about their dinners and everything--there was an
Englishman who wanted to pull down Knock-na-Rea" and so on. My mother had
shown them to me kissing at railway stations, and taught me to feel
disgust at their lack of reserve, and my father told how my grandfather,
William Yeats, who had died before I was born, when he came home to his
Rectory in County Down from an English visit, spoke of some man he had met
on a coach road who "Englishman-like" told him all his affairs. My father
explained that an Englishman generally believed that his private affairs
did him credit, while an Irishman, being poor and probably in debt, had no
such confidence. I, however, did not believe in this explanation. My Sligo
nurses, who had in all likelihood the Irish Catholic political hatred, had
never spoken well of any Englishman.

Once when walking in the town of Sligo I had turned to look after an
English man and woman whose clothes attracted me. The man I remember had
gray clothes and knee-breeches and the woman a gray dress, and my nurse
had said contemptuously, "towrows." Perhaps before my time, there had been
some English song with the burden "tow row row," and everybody had told me
that English people ate skates and even dog-fish, and I myself had only
just arrived in England when I saw an old man put marmalade in his
porridge. I was divided from all those boys, not merely by the anecdotes
that are everywhere perhaps a chief expression of the distrust of races,
but because our mental images were different. I read their boys' books and
they excited me, but if I read of some English victory, I did not believe
that I read of my own people. They thought of Cressy and Agincourt and the
Union Jack and were all very patriotic, and I, without those memories of
Limerick and the Yellow Ford that would have strengthened an Irish
Catholic, thought of mountain and lake, of my grandfather and of ships.
Anti-Irish feeling was running high, for the Land League had been founded
and landlords had be