April 3.  Met Davin at the cigar shop opposite Findlater’s church.  He was in a black sweater and had a hurley stick.  Asked me was it true I was going away and why.  Told him the shortest way to Tara was Via Holyhead.  Just then my father came up.  Introduction.  Father polite and observant.  Asked Davin if he might offer him some refreshment.  Davin could not, was going to a meeting.  When we came away father told me he had a good honest eye.  Asked me why I did not join a rowing club.  I pretended to think it over.  Told me then how he broke Pennyfeather’s heart.  Wants me to read law.  Says I was cut out for that.  More mud, more crocodiles.

April 5.  Wild spring.  Scudding clouds.  O life!  Dark stream of swirling bogwater on which apple-trees have cast down their delicate flowers.  Eyes of girls among the leaves.  Girls demure and romping.  All fair or auburn:  no dark ones.  They blush better.  Houpla!

April 6.  Certainly she remembers the past.  Lynch says all women do.  Then she remembers the time of her childhood—­and mine, if I was ever a child.  The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.  Statues of women, if Lynch be right, should always be fully draped, one hand of the woman feeling regretfully her own hinder parts.

April 6, Later.  Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world.  Not this.  Not at all.  I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

April 10.  Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the city which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the road.  Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge; and in a moment, as they pass the darkened windows, the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow.  They are heard now far away, hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as gems, hurrying beyond the sleeping fields to what journey’s end—­what heart? —­bearing what tidings?

April 11.  Read what I wrote last night.  Vague words for a vague emotion.  Would she like it?  I think so.  Then I should have to like it also.

April 13.  That tundish has been on my mind for a long time.  I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too.  Damn the dean of studies and his funnel!  What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us.  Damn him one way or the other!

April 14.  John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland.  European and Asiatic papers please copy.  He told us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin.  Old man had red eyes and short pipe.  Old man spoke Irish.  Mulrennan spoke Irish.  Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English.  Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars.  Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat.  Then said: