instinct like that of a savage, for
we had been brought up to laugh at all display of emotion. Yet it was our
mother, who would have thought its display a vulgarity, who kept alive
that love. She would spend hours listening to stories or telling stories
of the pilots and fishing people of Rosses Point, or of her own Sligo
girlhood, and it was always assumed between her and us that Sligo was more
beautiful than other places. I can see now that she had great depth of
feeling, that she was her father's daughter. My memory of what she was
like in those days has grown very dim, but I think her sense of
personality, her desire of any life of her own, had disappeared in her
care for us and in much anxiety about money. I always see her sewing or
knitting in spectacles and wearing some plain dress. Yet ten years ago
when I was in San Francisco, an old cripple came to see me who had left
Sligo before her marriage; he came to tell me, he said, that my mother
"had been the most beautiful girl in Sligo."

[Illustration: _Mrs. Yeats from a drawing by J. B. Yeats made in 1867_]

The only lessons I had ever learned were those my father taught me, for he
terrified me by descriptions of my moral degradation and he humiliated me
by my likeness to disagreeable people; but presently I was sent to school
at Hammersmith. It was a Gothic building of yellow brick: a large hall
full of desks, some small class-rooms and a separate house for boarders,
all built perhaps in 1840 or 1850. I thought it an ancient building and
that it had belonged to the founder of the school, Lord Godolphin, who was
romantic to me because there was a novel about him. I never read the
novel, but I thought only romantic people were put in books. On one side,
there was a piano factory of yellow brick, upon two sides half finished
rows of little shops and villas all yellow brick, and on the fourth side,
outside the wall of our playing field, a brickfield of cinders and piles
of half-burned yellow bricks. All the names and faces of my school-fellows
have faded from me except one name without a face and the face and name of
one friend, mainly no doubt because it was all so long ago, but partly
because I only seem to remember things that have mixed themselves up with
scenes that have some quality to bring them again and again before the
memory. For some days, as I walked homeward along the Hammersmith Road, I
told myself that whatever I most cared for had been taken away