e or
maybe he had a sensitiveness that would in another class have given him
taste & culture. I once forgot a copy of "Count Robert of Paris" on a
deck-seat, and when I found it again, it was all covered with the prints
of his dirty thumb. He had once seen the coach-a-baur or death coach. It
came along the road, he said, till it was hidden by a cottage and it never
came out on the other side of the cottage. Once I smelled new-mown hay
when we were quite a long way from land, and once when I was watching the
sea-parrots (as the sailors call the puffin) I noticed they had different
ways of tucking their heads under their wings, or I fancied it and said to
the captain "they have different characters." Sometimes my father came
too, and the sailors when they saw him coming would say "there is John
Yeats and we shall have a storm," for he was considered unlucky.

I no longer cared for little shut-in-places, for a coppice against the
stable-yard at Merville where my grandfather lived or against the gable at
Seaview where Aunt Micky lived, and I began to climb the mountains,
sometimes with the stable-boy for companion, and to look up their stories
in the county history. I fished for trout with a worm in the mountain
streams and went out herring-fishing at night: and because my grandfather
had said the English were in the right to eat skates, I carried a large
skate all the six miles or so from Rosses Point, but my grandfather did
not eat it.

One night just as the equinoctial gales were coming when I was sailing
home in the coastguard's boat a boy told me a beetle of solid gold,
strayed maybe from Poe's "gold bug," had been seen by somebody in Scotland
and I do not think that either of us doubted his news. Indeed, so many
stories did I hear from sailors along the wharf, or round the fo'castle
fire of the little steamer that ran between Sligo and Rosses, or from boys
out fishing that the world was full of monsters and marvels. The foreign
sailors wearing ear-rings did not tell me stories, but like the fishing
boys, I gazed at them in wonder and admiration. When I look at my
brother's picture, "Memory Harbour," houses and anchored ship and distant
lighthouse all set close together as in some old map, I recognize in the
blue-coated man with the mass of white shirt the pilot I went fishing
with, and I am full of disquiet and of excitement, and I am melancholy
because I have not made more and better verses. I have walked on Sinbad's