Reveries over Childhood and Youth

Reveries over Childhood and Youth is by William Butler Yeats. The preface says that sometimes, when the writer remembers a relative that he or she has been fond of, or a strange incident of the past, the writer wanders here and there till there is somebody to talk to. One recollection has the speaker, still a very little boy, called out of bed one night by an uncle to ride the five or six miles to Rosses Point to borrow a railway-pass from a cousin.

The speaker's grandfather had run away to sea when a boy, and the speaker remembers him with two books, his Bible and Falconer’s Shipwreck. A speaker says that the speaker's father often interfered, and always with disaster, to teach a Latin lesson, and would reply, when geography was raised, that it should never be taught. O’Leary is quoted as saying that neither Ireland nor England knows the good from the bad in any art, but that Ireland unlike England does not hate the good when it is pointed out to her.