the opinion of some architect friend of my father's, that it had
been put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however,
it had some village characters and helped us to feel not wholly
lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular
habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw these
words painted on a board in the porch: 'The congregation are
requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to
be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.' In front of every
seat hung a little cushion, and these cushions were called
'kneelers.' Presently the joke ran through the community, where
there were many artists, who considered religion at best an
unimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked that
particular church.




II


I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt,
when as a school-boy of twelve or thirteen, I had played among the
unfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked
by a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I
thought it was because these were real houses, while my play had
been among toy-houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary people
full of the happiness that one can see in picture books. I was in
all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen, my
father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their
poetry to read; & once in Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I had