French sympathizers have been brought to see the old buildings in Galway, and with the towns of Southern France in their mind's eye, are not in the least moved. The greater number are in a rather crowded hotel. Presently an acquaintance of mine peeping while it is still broad day from his bedroom window, sees the proprietress of the hotel near the hall door, and in the road a serious-minded, quixotic Dublin barrister with a little boy who carries from a stick over his shoulder twelve chamber-pots. He hears one angry, and one soft pleading explanatory voice "But Madam, I feel certain that at the unexpected arrival of so many guests, so many guests of the Nation I may say, you must have found yourself unprepared." "Never have I been so insulted." "Madam, I am thinking of the honour of my country."
I am at Maud Gonne's hotel, and an Italian sympathizer Cipriani, the friend of Garibaldi, is there, and though an old man now, he is the handsomest man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost story in English at one end of the room, and he is talking politics in French at the other. Somebody says "Yeats believes in ghosts," and Cipriani interrupts for a moment his impassioned conversation to say in English, and with a magnificent movement and intonation "As for me, I believe in nothing but cannon."
I call at the office of the Dublin organization in Westmoreland Street, and find the front door open, and the office door open, and though the office is empty the cupboard door open and eighteen pounds in gold upon the shelf.
At a London Committee meeting I notice a middle-aged man who slips into the room for a moment, whispers something to the secretary, lays three or four shillings on a table and slips out. I am told that he 1s an Irish board-school teacher who in early life took an oath neither to drink nor smoke, but to contribute the amount so saved weekly to the Irish Cause.
XLIX
A few months before I was drawn into politics, I made a friendship that was to make possible that old project of an Irish Theatre. Arthur Symons and I were staying at Tillyra Castle in County Galway with Mr Edward Martyn, when Lady Gregory, whom I had met once in London for a few minutes drove over, and after Symons'
