in my "Celtic Twilight" which is but a record of one such
afternoon, and many a fine tale has been lost because it had not occurred
to me soon enough to keep notes. My father was always praising her to my
sisters and to me, because she pretended to nothing she did not feel. She
would write him letters telling of her delight in the tumbling clouds, but
she did not care for pictures, and never went to an exhibition even to see
a picture of his, nor to his studio to see the day's work, neither now nor
when they were first married. I remember all this very clearly and little
after until her mind had gone in a stroke of paralysis and she had found,
liberated at last from financial worry, perfect happiness feeding the
birds at a London window. She had always, my father would say, intensity,
and that was his chief word of praise; and once he added to the praise "no
spendthrift ever had a poet for a son, though a miser might."

XIV

The great event of a boy's life is the awakening of sex. He will bathe
many times a day, or get up at dawn and having stripped leap to and fro
over a stick laid upon two chairs and hardly know, and never admit, that
he had begun to take pleasure in his own nakedness, nor will he
understand the change until some dream discovers it. He may never
understand at all the greater change in his mind.

It all came upon me when I was close upon seventeen like the bursting of a
shell. Somnambulistic country-girls, when it is upon them, throw plates
about or pull them with long hairs in simulation of the polter-geist, or
become mediums for some genuine spirit-mischief, surrendering to their
desire of the marvellous. As I look backward, I seem to discover that my
passions, my loves and my despairs, instead of being my enemies, a
disturbance and an attack, became so beautiful that I must be constantly
alone to give them my whole attention. I notice that, for the first time
as I run through my memory, what I saw when alone is more vivid than what
I did or saw in company.

A herd had shown me a cave some hundred and fifty feet below the cliff
path and a couple of hundred above the sea, and told me how an evicted
tenant called Macrom, dead some fifteen years, had lived there many years,
and shown me a rusty nail in the rock which had served perhaps to hold up
some wooden protection from wind and weather. Here I stored a tin of cocoa
and some biscuits, and instead of going to my bed, would slip out on warm
nigh