_Republished by kind permission of Mr. T. Fisher Unwin._
Having been persuaded somewhat against my judgment to include these
early stories, I have read them for the first time these many years.
They have come to interest me very deeply; for I am something of an
astrologer, and can see in them a young man--was I twenty-three? and
we Irish ripen slowly--born when the Water-Carrier was on the horizon,
at pains to overcome Saturn in Saturn’s hour, just as I can see in
much that follows his struggle with the still all-too-unconquered
Moon, and at last, as I think, the summons of the prouder Sun. Sligo,
where I had lived as a child and spent some months or weeks of every
year till long after, is Ballah, and Pool Dhoya is at the river mouth
there, and he who gave me all of Sherman that was not born at the
rising of the Water-Carrier has still the bronze upon his face, and is
at this moment, it may be, in his walled garden, wondering, as he did
twenty years ago, whether he will ever mend the broken glass of the
conservatory, where I am not too young to recollect the vine-trees and
grapes that did not ripen.