might twitter and bright winds flutter
in the trees without.

When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long
days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his
especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest
for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every
Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian
warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are
to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay.

Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he
was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many
additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often
too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered
for his habit of "drawing the long bow."

Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly
during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was
not distinguished by accuracy of statement.

The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those
surrounding him--not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford
fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from
wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world.
While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was
building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light
of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which
none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul
entrenched itself.

Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears
filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he
saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens
and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and
divine--the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of
beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it,
recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and
existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing
of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from
countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from
the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came."

It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in
the sket