In the December after I was first cast ashore at Holyhead, I had to go down to Dorsetshire.  In those days the more enterprising farm-laborers used still to annually dress themselves up in order to tickle the gentry into disbursing the money needed to supplement a local-minimum wage.  They called themselves the Christmas Mummers, and performed a play entitled Snt George.  As my education had been of the typical Irish kind, and the ideas on which I had been nourished were precisely the ideas that once in Tara’s Hall were regarded as dangerous novelties, Snt George staggered me with the sense of being suddenly bumped up against a thing which lay centuries ahead of the time I had been born into. (Being, in point of fact, only a matter of five hundred years old, it would have the same effect to-day on the average London playgoer if it was produced in a west end theatre.) The plot was simple.  It is set forth in Thomas Hardy’s “Return of the Native”; but, as the people who read my books have no energy left over to cope with other authors, I must supply an outline of it myself.

Entered, first of all, the English Knight, announcing his determination to fight and vanquish the Turkish Knight, a vastly superior swordsman, who promptly made mincemeat of him.  After the Saracen had celebrated his victory in verse, and proclaimed himself the world’s champion, entered Snt George, who, after some preliminary patriotic flourishes, promptly made mincemeat of the Saracen—­to the blank amazement of an audience which included several retired army officers.  Snt George, however, saved his face by the usual expedient of the victorious British general, attributing to Providence a result which by no polite stretch of casuistry could have been traced to the operations of his own brain.  But here the dramatist was confronted by another difficulty:  there being no curtain to ring down, how were the two corpses to be got gracefully rid of?  Entered therefore the Physician, and brought them both to life. (Any one objecting to this scene on the score of romantic improbability is hereby referred to the Royal College of Physicians, or to the directors of any accredited medical journal, who will hail with delight this opportunity of proving once and for all that re-vitalisation is the child’s-play of the Faculty.)

Such then is the play that I have stolen.  For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—­dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like—­you must bless the original author:  of these things I have only the usufruct.  To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in.  Modest?  Not a bit of it.  It is my civistic conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play a masterpiece.