at
North End, but wound about where there was a big tree or for the mere
pleasure of winding, and there were wood palings instead of iron railings.
The newness of everything, the empty houses where we played at
hide-and-seek, and the strangeness of it all, made us feel that we were
living among toys. We could imagine people living happy lives as we
thought people did long ago when the poor were picturesque and the master
of a house would tell of strange adventures over the sea. Only the better
houses had been built. The commercial builder had not begun to copy and to
cheapen, and besides we only knew the most beautiful houses, the houses of
artists. My two sisters and my brother and myself had dancing lessons in a
low, red-brick and tiled house that drove away dreams, long cherished, of
some day living in a house made exactly like a ship's cabin. The
dining-room table, where Sinbad the sailor might have sat, was painted
peacock-blue, and the woodwork was all peacock-blue and upstairs there was
a window niche so big and high up, there was a flight of steps to go up
and down by and a table in the niche. The two sisters of the master of the
house, a well-known pre-Raphaelite painter, were our teachers, and they
and their old mother were dressed in peacock-blue and in dresses so simply
cut that they seemed a part of every story. Once when I had been looking
with delight at the old woman, my father who had begun to be influenced by
French art, muttered, "imagine dressing up your old mother like that."

[Illustration: _John Butler Yeats from a watercolour drawing by himself_]

My father's friends were painters who had been influenced by the
pre-Raphaelite movement but had lost their confidence. Wilson, Page,
Nettleship, Potter are the names I remember, and at North End, I remember
them most clearly. I often heard one and another say that Rossetti had
never mastered his materials, and though Nettleship had already turned
lion-painter, my father talked constantly of the designs of his youth,
especially of "God creating Evil," which Browning praised in a letter my
father had seen "as the most sublime conception in ancient or modern
Art." In those early days, that he might not be tempted from his work by
society, he had made a rent in the tail of his coat; and I have heard my
mother tell how she had once sewn it up, but before he came again he had
pulled out all the stitches. Potter's exquisite "Dormouse," now in the
Tate Gal