When in Paris in 1899, he met Mr. W. B. Yeats who, having seen his
work suggested that he would do well to give up writing criticism,
and go again to the Aran Islands to study the life there, and fill
his mind with real and new images, so that, if he wrote later, his
writing might be lively and fresh and his subject a new discovery.
He did as Mr. Yeats suggested and went back to the Aran Islands
and passed some weeks in Inishmaan. In all, he made five or six
visits to the Aran Islands, these two of 1898 and 1899, and
certainly three more in the autumns of 1900, 1901, 1902.
The Islanders liked him but were a little puzzled by him. He
was an unassertive, unassuming man, with a genius for being
inconspicuous. He has told us that his usual method in a poor
man's cabin was to make them forget that he was there, but in Aran
on these visits he always tried to add to the fun, and to his
personal prestige with conjuring tricks, fiddling, piping, taking
photographs, etc. Some of the Islanders were much attached to him.
I suppose that their main impression was that he was a linguist
who had committed a crime somewhere and had come to hide.

His next three or four years, 1899-1902 were passed between Paris
and Ireland; Paris in the winter and spring and Ireland in the
other seasons. He was at work on _The Aran Islands_, and on his
three early one act plays, _The Tinker's Wedding_, _Riders to the
Sea_, and _The Shadow of the Glen_. He came to London in the
winter of 1902-3, where I saw him as I have described. London did
not suit him and he did not stay long. He gave up his room in
Paris at this time, with some searching of the heart; for at
thirty one clings to youth. After this, he was mostly in Ireland,
in the wilder West and elsewhere; writing and perfecting. At the
end of 1904 he was in Dublin, for the opening of the Abbey Theatre