girl--a cousin I think--having waited under a group of trees in the
avenue, where she knew he would pass near four o'clock on the way to his
dinner, said to him, "if I were you and you were a little girl, I would
give you a doll."

Yet for all my admiration and alarm, neither I nor anyone else thought it
wrong to outwit his violence or his rigour; and his lack of suspicion and
a certain helplessness made that easy while it stirred our affection. When
I must have been still a very little boy, seven or eight years old
perhaps, an uncle called me out of bed one night, to ride the five or six
miles to Rosses Point to borrow a railway-pass from a cousin. My
grandfather had one, but thought it dishonest to let another use it, but
the cousin was not so particular. I was let out through a gate that opened
upon a little lane beside the garden away from ear-shot of the house, and
rode delighted through the moonlight, and awoke my cousin in the small
hours by tapping on his window with a whip. I was home again by two or
three in the morning and found the coachman waiting in the little lane. My
grandfather would not have thought such an adventure possible, for every
night at eight he believed that the stable-yard was locked, and he knew
that he was brought the key. Some servant had once got into trouble at
night and so he had arranged that they should all be locked in. He never
knew, what everybody else in the house knew, that for all the ceremonious
bringing of the key the gate was never locked.

Even to-day when I read "King Lear" his image is always before me and I
often wonder if the delight in passionate men in my plays and in my poetry
is more than his memory. He must have been ignorant, though I could not
judge him in my childhood, for he had run away to sea when a boy, "gone to
sea through the hawse-hole" as he phrased it, and I can but remember him
with two books--his Bible and Falconer's "Shipwreck," a little
green-covered book that lay always upon his table; he belonged to some
younger branch of an old Cornish family. His father had been in the Army,
had retired to become an owner of sailing ships, and an engraving of some
old family place my grandfather thought should have been his hung next a
painted coat of arms in the little back parlour. His mother had been a
Wexford woman, and there was a tradition that his family had been linked
with Ireland for generations and once had their share in the old Spanish
trade with Ga