re, and Wind. _(They join hands.)_

_Jester_: It's likely you'll do great actions, for
there is an ancient word,
That comradeship is better than the parting of
the sword,
And that if ever two natures should join and
grow into one,
They will do more together than the world has
ever done.
So now I've ended my business, and I'll go, for
my road is long,
But be sure the Jester will find you out, if ever
things go wrong!

_(He goes off singing.)_

And so I follow after
Lycurgus who was wise;
To the little god of laughter
I pay my sacrifice!

CURTAIN

NOTES FOR THE JESTER

I was asked one Christmas by a little schoolboy to write
a play that could be acted at school; and in looking for
a subject my memory went back to a story I had read in
childhood called "The Discontented Children," where,
though I forget its incidents, the gamekeeper's children
changed places for a while with the children of the Squire,
and I thought I might write something on these lines.
But my mind soon went miching as our people (and
Shakespeare) would say, and broke through the English
hedges into the unbounded wonder-world. Yet it did
not quite run out of reach of human types, for having found
some almost illegible notes, I see that at the first appearance
of Manannan I had put in brackets the initials "G.B.S."
And looking now at the story of that Great Jester, in the
history of the ancient gods, I see that for all his quips and
mischief and "tricks and wonders," he came when he
was needed to the help of Finn and the Fianna, and gave
good teaching to the boy-hero, Cuchulain; and I read
also that "all the food he would use would be a vessel of
sour milk or a few crab-apples. And there never was any
music sweeter than the music he used to be playing."

I have without leave borrowed a phrase from "The
Candle of Vision," written by my liberal fellow-countryman,
A.E., where he says, "I felt at times as one raised from
the dead, made virginal and pure, who renews exquisite
intimacies with the divine companions, with Earth, Water,
Air, and Fire." And I think he will forgive me for quoting
another passage now from the same book, for I think it
must have been in my mind when I wrote of my Wrenboys:
"The lands of Immortal Youth which flush with magic
the dreams of childhood, for most sink soon below far
horizons and do not again arise. For around childhood
gather the wizards of the darkness and they baptize it
and change its