a hammer to
look for fossils in the Howth Cliffs. "You know," I would say, "that such
and such human remains cannot be less, because of the strata they were
found in, than fifty thousand years old." "Oh!" he would answer, "they are
an isolated instance." And once when I pressed hard my case against
Ussher's chronology, he begged me not to speak of the subject again. "If I
believed what you do," he said, "I could not live a moral life." But I
could not even argue with the athlete who still collected his butterflies
for the adventure's sake, and with no curiosity but for their names. I
began to judge his intelligence, and to tell him that his natural history
had as little to do with science as his collection of postage stamps. Even
during my school days in London, influenced perhaps by my father, I had
looked down upon the postage stamps.

XIII

Our house for the first year or so was on the top of a cliff, so that in
stormy weather the spray would sometimes soak my bed at night, for I had
taken the glass out of the window, sash and all. A literary passion for
the open air was to last me for a few years. Then for another year or two,
we had a house overlooking the harbour where the one great sight was the
going and coming of the fishing fleet. We had one regular servant, a
fisherman's wife, and the occasional help of a big, red-faced girl who ate
a whole pot of jam while my mother was at church and accused me of it.
Some such arrangement lasted until long after the time I write of, and
until my father going into the kitchen by chance found a girl, who had
been engaged during a passing need, in tears at the thought of leaving our
other servant, and promised that they should never be parted. I have no
doubt that we lived at the harbour for my mother's sake. She had, when we
were children, refused to take us to a seaside place because she heard it
possessed a bathing box, but she loved the activities of a fishing
village. When I think of her, I almost always see her talking over a cup
of tea in the kitchen with our servant, the fisherman's wife, on the only
themes outside our house that seemed of interest--the fishing people of
Howth, or the pilots and fishing people of Rosses Point. She read no
books, but she and the fisherman's wife would tell each other stories that
Homer might have told, pleased with any moment of sudden intensity and
laughing together over any point of satire. There is an essay called
"Village Ghosts"