evening.'

Yet say what I will, so strange is the pleasure that they give, so
hard to analyse and describe, I do not know why these stories and
plays delight me. Now they set me thinking of some old Irish jewel
work, now of a sword covered with Indian Arabesques that hangs in a
friend's hall, now of St. Mark's at Venice, now of cloud palaces at
the sundown; but more often still of a strange country or state of the
soul that once for a few weeks I entered in deep sleep and after lost
and have ever mourned and desired.


V

Not all Lord Dunsany's moods delight me, for he writes out of a
careless abundance; and from the moment I first read him I have wished
to have between two covers something of all the moods that do. I
believe that I have it in this book, which I have just been reading
aloud to an imaginative young girl more French than English, whose
understanding, that of a child and of a woman, and expressed not in
words but in her face, has doubled my own. Some of my selections,
those that I have called 'A Miracle' and 'The Castle of Time' are
passages from stories of some length, and I give but the first act of
'Argimenes,' a play in the repertory of the Abbey Theatre, but each
selection can be read I think with no thoughts but of itself. If 'Idle
Days on the Yann' is a fragment it was left so by its author, and if
I am moved to complain I shall remember that perhaps not even his
imagination could have found adventures worthy of a traveller who had
passed 'memorable, holy Golnuz, and heard the pilgrims praying,' and
smelt burned poppies in Mandaroon.