No More Learning

When at last the ship came, and Doran had to break
it to her that he was not going to America, she cried more after him
than after the first lover. Doran whispered to Byrne as he went aboard
ship, 'Now, Byrne, I don't grudge her to you, but don't marry young. '

When the story got to this, the farmer's daughter joined in mockingly
with, 'I suppose you said that for Byrne's good, father. ' But the
old man insisted that he _had_ said it for Byrne's good; and went
on to tell how, when he got a letter telling of Byrne's engagement
to the girl, he wrote him the same advice. Years passed by, and he
heard nothing; and though he was now married, he could not keep from
wondering what she was doing. At last he went to America to find out,
and though he asked many people for tidings, he could get none. More
years went by, and his wife was dead, and he well on in years, and a
rich farmer with not a few great matters on his hands. He found an
excuse in some vague business to go out to America again, and to begin
his search again. One day he fell into talk with an Irishman in a
railway carriage, and asked him, as his way was, about emigrants from
this place and that, and at last, 'Did you ever hear of the miller's
daughter from Innis Rath? ' and he named the woman he was looking for.
'Oh yes,' said the other, 'she is married to a friend of mine, John
MacEwing. She lives at such-and-such a street in Chicago. ' Doran went
to Chicago and knocked at her door. She opened the door herself, and
was 'not a bit changed. ' He gave her his real name, which he had taken
again after his grandfather's death, and the name of the man he had
met in the train.
She did not recognize him, but asked him to stay to
dinner, saying that her husband would be glad to meet anybody who knew
that old friend of his. They talked of many things, but for all their
talk, I do not know why, and perhaps he did not know why, he never told
her who he was. At dinner he asked her about Byrne, and she put her
head down on the table and began to cry, and she cried so he was afraid
her husband might be angry. He was afraid to ask what had happened to
Byrne, and left soon after, never to see her again.

When the old man had finished the story, he said, 'Tell that to Mr.
Yeats, he will make a poem about it, perhaps. ' But the daughter said,
'Oh no, father. Nobody could make a poem about a woman like that. '
Alas! I have never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart which
has loved Helen and all the lovely and fickle women of the world, would
be too sore. There are things it is well not to ponder over too much,
things that bare words are the best suited for.

1902.




THE SORCERERS


IN Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers,[D] and come across
any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the
people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy
and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were
they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are
of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his
rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store
their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit
hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and
melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or
through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their
hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women
full of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the
earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling
about us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and
that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of
magic have been but little practised.