'Nobody will employ me now,'
he said. 'Your master is gone,' I answered, 'and you are like the
spear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-
juice that it might not go about killing people on its own
account.' I wrote my first good lyrics and tolerable essays for
'The National Obsever' and as I always signed my work could go my
own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, crossing
out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was
comforted by my belief that he also re-wrote Kipling then in the
first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of
being re-written and thought that others were not, and only began
investigation when the editorial characteristics--epigrams,
archaisms and all--appeared in the article upon Paris fashions and
in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I was not compelled to
full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose, that
I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost or
fairy stories, picked up from my mother, or some pilot at Rosses
Point, and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my
subject matter.
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