"Is childhood dead?" Lamb asks; "is there not in the best some of the child\'s heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?" Can I now, without a responsive thrill, see myself flash into the unaltered dulness of that Kildare village, a little princess of legend, with the glory of foreign travel about me, the overseas cut of frock and shoes, the haughty and condescending consciousness of superiority?

They were all so visibly at my feet, so glad to worship and admire, so eager to praise, so beset with wonder. I was to spend a week in their midst, a delightful week, as long as a story, as brief as a play, a puff of happiness blown across the bleak wind of solitude, a prolonged and hilarious scamper through sensation as vivid and vital as morning light.

Mary Jane was there, with the unchanged oiled black ringlets, and in my honour she wore them bound with a bright blue ribbon. Louie[Pg 202] came out from town to behold me, and gazed in stupefied awe. I had been in a ship across the sea. I had traversed half of England in a railway-carriage. Had I seen an elephant? Mary Jane wanted to know if I had seen the Queen.

No; but I had seen a naked lady, with beautiful golden hair down her back, ride through the town of Lysterby on a white pony, while twelve lovely pages in silver and gold and satin rode before, and twelve lovely maidens with long velvet cloaks lined with white satin rode behind her. This sounded as grand as a royal procession, and I glided ingeniously over the ignominy of having been to England and not having seen the Queen.

Mary Jane\'s mamma gave me a bowl of milk and a plate of arrowroot biscuits, and as I devoured them, with what a splendid air I recognised the old and faded views of New York! I scorned my past ignorance, and off-handedly mentioned that "You know, the sea isn\'t a bit like the pond." And then the search for a brilliant and captivating comparison—arm extended to suggest immensity; heaving wave, rolling ship.

"Isn\'t she wonderful?" they cried; "and the fine language of her!"
 
From cottage to cottage, from shop to shop, I wandered, intoxicated by the incense of admiration. I embroidered fact and invented fiction with the readiness of the fanciful traveller. Sister Esmeralda became an unimaginable fiend, who had persecuted me as if I had been the heroine of the fairy-tale I was acting, till the entire village was fit to rise and shout for her blood.

"The likes of that did you ever hear?" a gaunt peasant in corduroy would ask his neighbour in dismay.

"Troth and \'tis thim English as is a quare lot. Beat a little lady as is fit to rule the lot of them, and lock her up in dungeons along with spirits and goblins, and starve the life and soul out of her! Sure \'tis worse they are than in the days of Cromwell."

Naturally, in the amazing record of my experiences, the hidden bones and marble hand of my old friend, the White Lady of the Ivies, played a prominent and shuddering part.

Under the influence of such an audience I tasted the fascinating results of suffering. I was in that brief w............