distaff of memory, any who will can
weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too
have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it,
and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has
built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out
their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved
daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little.

1893.

II

I have added a few more chapters in the manner of the old ones, and
would have added others, but one loses, as one grows older, something
of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both
hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no
great loss per haps. In these new chapters, as in the old ones, I have
invented nothing but my comments and one or two deceitful sentences
that may keep some poor story-teller's commerce with the devil and his
angels, or the like, from being known among his neighbours. I shall
publish in a little while a big book about the commonwealth of faery,
and shall try to make it systematical and learned enough to buy pardon
for this handful of dreams.

1902.

W. B. YEATS.

A TELLER OF TALES

Many of the tales in this book were told me by one Paddy Flynn, a
little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin
in the village of Ballisodare, which is, he was wont to say, "the most
gentle"--whereby he meant faery--"place in the whole of County Sligo."
Others hold it, however, but second to Drumcliff and Drumahair. The
first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the next
time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed
always cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as the
eyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) a
melancholy which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary
melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all animals.

And yet there was much in his life to depress him, for in the triple
solitude of age, eccentricity, and deafness, he went about much
pestered by children. It was for this very reason perhaps that he ever
recommended mirth and hopefulness. He was fond, for instance, of
telling how Collumcille cheered up his mother. "How are you to-day,
mother?" said the saint. "Worse," replied the mother. "May you be worse
to-morrow