1 files changed, 10106 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/37293-8.txt b/37293-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..19da8c6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/37293-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10106 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Divine Adventure etc. (Works vol. 4), by 
+Fiona Macleod
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Divine Adventure etc. (Works vol. 4)
+
+Author: Fiona Macleod
+
+Release Date: September 3, 2011 [EBook #37293]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DIVINE ADVENTURE ETC. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Delphine Lettau, Judith Wirawan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  +------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes:                                             |
+  |                                                                  |
+  | Words surrounded by _ are italicized.                            |
+  |                                                                  |
+  | Due to the restriction of the latin-1 font, diacritical marking  |
+  | macron (straight horizonal line above a letter) in this text is  |
+  | represented with [=x].                                           |
+  |                                                                  |
+  | A number of obvious errors have been corrected in this text. For |
+  | a complete list, please see the bottom of this document.         |
+  |                                                                  |
+  +------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+  The Works of
+
+  "FIONA MACLEOD"
+
+  _UNIFORM EDITION_
+
+  ARRANGED BY
+
+  MRS. WILLIAM SHARP
+
+  VOLUME IV
+
+
+
+
+    _The Gods approve the depth and not the tumult of
+  the soul._
+
+        _It is loveliness I seek, not lovely things._
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: From the original by L. Y. Cameron
+Iona Cathedral]
+
+
+
+
+  THE DIVINE ADVENTURE
+
+  IONA
+
+  STUDIES IN SPIRITUAL HISTORY
+
+  BY
+
+  "FIONA MACLEOD"
+  (WILLIAM SHARP)
+
+
+  LONDON
+  WILLIAM HEINEMANN
+  1912
+
+
+  _UNIFORM EDITION_
+
+  _First published 1910. New Edition 1912_
+
+  _Copyright 1895, 1910._
+
+
+
+
+           THE WIND, SILENCE, AND LOVE
+         FRIENDS WHO HAVE TAUGHT ME MOST:
+  BUT SINCE,  LONG AGO, TWO WHO ARE NOT FORGOTTEN
+   WENT AWAY UPON THE ONE, AND DWELL, THEMSELVES
+  REMEMBERING, IN THE OTHER, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+                        TO
+                    EALASAIDH
+       WHOSE LOVE AND SPIRIT LIVE HERE ALSO
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+  THE DIVINE ADVENTURE                                               1
+
+  IONA                                                              91
+
+  BY SUNDOWN SHORES:
+
+      BY SUNDOWN SHORES                                            253
+
+      THE WIND, SILENCE, AND LOVE                                  263
+
+      BARABAL: A MEMORY                                            268
+
+      THE WHITE HERON                                              276
+
+      THE SMOOTHING OF THE HAND                                    292
+
+      THE WHITE FEVER                                              298
+
+      THE SEA-MADNESS                                              303
+
+      EARTH, FIRE, AND WATER                                       308
+
+  FROM "GREEN FIRE":
+
+      THE HERDSMAN                                                 319
+
+      FRAGMENTS                                                    383
+
+  A DREAM                                                          405
+
+  NOTES                                                            411
+
+  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                                             433
+      By Mrs. William Sharp.
+
+
+
+
+THE DIVINE ADVENTURE
+
+
+  "_Let the beginning, I say, of this little book, as if it were some
+  lamp, make it clear that a divine miracle was manifested._"
+
+                                       _St. Adamnan_, Book II. c. I.
+
+
+
+
+The Divine Adventure
+
+
+I
+
+  "We were three: the Body, the Will, and the Soul.... The Will, the
+  Soul, which for the first time had gone along outside of our common
+  home, had to take upon themselves bodily presences likewise."--_The
+  Divine Adventure._
+
+I remember that it was on St. John's Eve we said we would go away
+together for a time, but each independently, as three good friends. We
+had never been at one, though we had shared the same home, and had
+enjoyed so much in common; but to each, at the same time, had come the
+great desire of truth, than which there is none greater save that of
+beauty.
+
+We had long been somewhat weary. No burden of years, no serious ills, no
+grief grown old in its own shadow, distressed us. We were young. But we
+had known the two great ends of life--to love and to suffer. In deep
+love there is always an inmost dark flame, as in the flame lit by a
+taper: I think it is the obscure suffering upon which the Dancer lives.
+The Dancer!--Love, who is Joy, is a leaping flame: he it is who is the
+son of that fabled planet, the Dancing Star.
+
+On that St. John's Eve we had talked with friends on the old mysteries
+of this day of pagan festival. At last we withdrew, not tired or in
+disagreement, but because the hidden things of the spirit are the only
+realities, and it seemed to us a little idle and foolish to discuss in
+the legend that which was not fortuitous or imaginary, since what then
+held up white hands in the moonlight, even now, in the moonlight of the
+dreaming mind, beckons to the Divine Forges.
+
+We left the low-roofed cottage room, where, though the window was open,
+two candles burned with steadfast flame. The night was listeningly
+still. Beyond the fuchsia bushes a sighing rose, where a continuous
+foamless wave felt the silences of the shore. The moonpath, far out upon
+the bronze sea, was like a shadowless white road. In the dusk of the
+haven glimmered two or three red and green lights, where the
+fishing-cobles trailed motionless at anchor. Inland were shadowy hills.
+One of the St. John's Eve fires burned on the nearest of these, its cone
+blotting out a thousand eastern stars. The flame rose and sank as
+though it were a pulse: perhaps at that great height the sea-wind or a
+mountain air played upon it. Out of a vast darkness in the south swung
+blacker abysses, where thunders breathed with a prolonged and terrible
+sighing; upon their flanks sheet-lightnings roamed.
+
+There was no sound in the little bay. Beyond, a fathom of
+phosphorescence showed that mackerel were playing in the moonshine. Near
+the trap-ledges, which ran into deep water sheer from the goat-pastures,
+were many luminous moving phantoms: the medusæ, green, purple, pale
+blue, wandering shapes filled with ghostly fire.
+
+We stood a while in silence, then one of us spoke:
+
+"Shall we put aside, for a brief while, this close fellowship of ours;
+and, since we cannot journey apart, go together to find if there be any
+light upon those matters which trouble us, and perhaps discern things
+better separately than when trying, as we ever vainly do, to see the
+same thing with the same eyes?"
+
+The others agreed. "It may be I shall know," said one? "It may be I
+shall remember," said the other.
+
+"Then let us go back into the house and rest to-night, and to-morrow,
+after we have slept and eaten well, we can set out with a light heart."
+
+The others did not answer, for though to one food meant nothing, and to
+the other sleep was both a remembering and a forgetting, each
+unwittingly felt the keen needs of him whom they despised overmuch, and
+feared somewhat, and yet loved greatly.
+
+
+II
+
+Thus it was that on a midsummer morning we set out alone and afoot, not
+bent for any one place, though we said we would go towards the dim blue
+hills in the west, the Hills of Dream, as we called them; but, rather,
+idly troubled by the very uncertainties which beset our going. We began
+that long stepping westward as pilgrims of old who had the Holy City for
+their goal, but knew that midway were perilous lands.
+
+We were three, as I have said: the Body, the Will, and the Soul. It was
+strange for us to be walking there side by side, each familiar with and
+yet so ignorant of the other. We had so much in common, and yet were so
+incommunicably alien to one another. I think that occurred to each of
+us, as, with brave steps but sidelong eyes, we passed the fuchsia
+bushes, where the wild bees hummed, and round by the sea pastures, where
+white goats nibbled among the yellow flags, and shaggy kine with their
+wild hill-eyes browsed the thyme-sweet salted grass. A fisherman met us.
+It was old Ian Macrae, whom I had known for many years. Somehow, till
+then, the thought had not come to me that it might seem unusual to those
+who knew my solitary ways, that I should be going to and fro with
+strangers. Then, again for the first time, it flashed across me that
+they were so like me--or save in the eyes I could myself discern no
+difference--the likeness would be as startling as it would be
+unaccountable.
+
+I stood for a moment, uncertain. "Of course," I muttered below my
+breath, "of course, the others are invisible; I had not thought of
+that." I watched them slowly advance, for they had not halted when I
+did. I saw them incline the head with a grave smile as they passed Ian.
+The old man had taken off his bonnet to them, and had stood aside.
+
+Strangely disquieted, I moved towards Macrae.
+
+"Ian," I whispered rather than spoke.
+
+"Ay," he answered simply, looking at me with his grave, far-seeing eyes.
+
+"Ian, have you seen my friends before?"
+
+"No, I have never seen them before."
+
+"They have been here for--for--many days."
+
+"I have not seen them."
+
+"Tell me; do you recognise them?"
+
+"I have not seen them before."
+
+"I mean, do you--do you see any likeness in them to any you know?"
+
+"No, I see no likeness."
+
+"You are sure, Ian?"
+
+"Ay, for sure. And why not?" The old fisherman looked at me with
+questioning eyes.
+
+"Tell me, Ian, do you see any difference in me?"
+
+"No, for sure, no."
+
+Bewildered, I pondered this new mystery. Were we really three
+personalities, without as well as within?
+
+At that moment the Will turned. I heard his voice fall clearly along the
+heather-fragrant air-ledges.
+
+"We, too, are bewildered by this mystery," he said.
+
+So he knew my thought. It was _our_ thought. Yes, for now the Soul
+turned also; and I heard his sunwarm breath come across the
+honeysuckles by the roadside.
+
+"I, too, am bewildered by this mystery," he said.
+
+"Ian," I exclaimed to the old man, who stared wonderingly at us; "Ian
+tell me this: what like are my companions; how do they seem to you?"
+
+The old man glanced at me, startled, then rubbed his eyes as though he
+were half-awakened from a dream.
+
+"Why are you asking that thing?"
+
+"Because, Ian, you do not see any likeness in them to myself. I had
+thought--I had thought they were so like."
+
+Macrae put his wavering, wrinkled hand to his withered mouth. He gave a
+chuckling laugh.
+
+"Ah, I understand now. It is a joke you are playing on old Ian."
+
+"Maybe ay, and maybe no, Ian; but I do want to know how they seem to
+you, those two yonder."
+
+"Well, well, now, for sure, that friend of yours there, that spoke
+first, he is just a weary, tired old man, like I am myself, and so like
+me, now that I look at him, that he might be my wraith. And the other,
+he is a fine lad, a fisher-lad for sure, though I fear God's gripped
+his heart, for I see the old ancient sorrow in his eyes."
+
+I stared: then suddenly I understood.
+
+"Good-day, Ian," I added hurriedly, "and the blessing of Himself be upon
+you and yours, and upon the nets and the boats."
+
+Then I moved slowly towards my companions, who awaited me. I understood
+now. The old fisherman had seen after his own kind. The Will, the Soul,
+which for the first time had journeyed outside our common home, had to
+take upon themselves bodily presences likewise. But these wavering
+images were to others only the reflection of whoso looked upon them. Old
+Ian had seen his own tired self and his lost youth. With a new fear the
+Body called to us, and we to him; and we were one, yet three; and so we
+went onward together.
+
+
+III
+
+We were silent. It is not easy for three, so closely knit, so intimate,
+as we had been for so many years, suddenly to enter upon a new
+comradeship, wherein three that had been as one were now several. A new
+reticence had come to each of us. We walked in silence--conscious of
+the beauty of the day, in sea and sky and already purpling moors; of the
+white gulls flecking the azure, and the yellowhammers and stonechats
+flitting among the gorse and fragrant bog-myrtle--we knew that none was
+inclined to speak. Each had his own thoughts.
+
+The three dreamers--for so we were in that lovely hour of dream--walked
+steadfastly onward. It was not more than an hour after noon that we came
+to an inlet of the sea, so narrow that it looked like a stream, only
+that a salt air arose between the irises which thickly bordered it, and
+that the sunken rock-ledges were fragrant with sea-pink and the
+stone-convolvulus. The moving tidal water was grass-green, save where
+dusked with long, mauve shadows.
+
+"Let us rest here," said the Body. "It is so sweet in the sunlight, here
+by this cool water."
+
+The Will smiled as he threw himself down upon a mossy slope that reached
+from an oak's base to the pebbly margins.
+
+"It is ever so with you," he said, still smiling. "You love rest, as the
+wandering clouds love the waving hand of the sun."
+
+"What made you think of that?" asked the Soul abruptly, who till that
+moment had been rapt in silent commune with his inmost thoughts.
+
+"Why do you ask?"
+
+"Because I, too, was thinking that just as the waving hand of the sun
+beckons the white wandering clouds, as a shepherd calls to his scattered
+sheep, so there is a hand waving to us to press forward. Far away,
+yonder, a rainbow is being woven of sun and mist. Perhaps, there, we may
+come upon that which we have come out to see."
+
+"But the Body wishes to rest. And, truly, it is sweet here in the
+sunflood, and by this moving green water, which whispers in the reeds
+and flags, and sings its own sea-song the while."
+
+"Let us rest, then."
+
+And, as we lay there, a great peace came upon us. There were hushed
+tears in the eyes of the Soul, and a dreaming smile upon the face of the
+Will, and, in the serene gaze of the Body, a content that was exceeding
+sweet. It was so welcome to lie there and dream. We knew a rare
+happiness in that exquisite quietude.
+
+After a time, the Body rose, and moved to the water-edge.
+
+"It is so lovely," he said, "I must bathe"--and with that he threw
+aside his clothes, and stood naked among the reeds and yellow flags
+which bordered the inlet.
+
+The sun shone upon his white body, the colour of pale ivory. A delicate
+shadow lightly touched him, now here, now there, from the sunlit green
+sheaths and stems among which he stood. He laughed out of sheer joy and
+raised his arms, and made a splashing with his trampling feet.
+
+Looking backward with a blithe glance, he cried:
+
+"After all, it is good to be alive: neither to think nor to dream, but
+just content _to be_."
+
+Receiving no answer, he laughed merrily, and, plunging forward, swam
+seaward against the sun-dazzle.
+
+His two companions watched him with shining eyes.
+
+"Truly, he is very fair to look upon," said the Soul.
+
+"Yes," added the Will, "and perhaps he has chosen the better part
+elsewhere as here."
+
+"Can it be the better part to prefer the things of the moment of those
+of Eternity?"
+
+"What is Eternity?"
+
+For a few seconds the Soul was silent. It was not easy for him to
+understand that what was a near horizon to him was a vague vista,
+possibly a mirage, to another. He was ever, in himself, moving just the
+hither side of the narrow mortal horizon which Eternity swims in upon
+from behind and beyond. The Will looked at him questioningly, then spoke
+again:
+
+"You speak of the things of Eternity. What is Eternity?"
+
+"Eternity is the Breath of God."
+
+"That tells me nothing."
+
+"It is Time, freed from his Mortality."
+
+"Again, that tells me little. Or, rather, I am no wiser. What is
+Eternity to _us_?"
+
+"It is our perpetuity."
+
+"Then is it only a warrant against Death?"
+
+"No, it is more. Time is our sphere: Eternity is our home."
+
+"There is no other lesson for you in the worm, and in the dust?"
+
+"What do you mean, brother?"
+
+"Does dissolution mean nothing to you?"
+
+"What is dissolution?"
+
+It was now the Will who stared with wondering eyes. To him that question
+was as disquieting as that which he had asked the Soul. It was a minute
+before he spoke again.
+
+"You ask me what is dissolution? Do you not understand what death means
+to _me_?"
+
+"Why to you more than to me, or to the Body?"
+
+"What is it to you?"
+
+"A change from a dream of Beauty, to Beauty."
+
+"And at the worst?"
+
+"Freedom: escape from narrow walls--often dark and foul."
+
+"In any case nothing but a change, a swift and absolute change, from
+what was to what is?"
+
+"Even so."
+
+"And you have no fear?"
+
+"None. Why should I?"
+
+"Why should you not?"
+
+Again there was a sudden silence between the two. At last the Soul
+spoke:
+
+"Why should I not? I cannot tell you. But I have no fear. I am a Son of
+God."
+
+"And we?"
+
+"Ah, yes, dear brother: you, too, and the Body."
+
+"But we perish!"
+
+"There is the resurrection of the Body."
+
+"Where--when?"
+
+"As it is written. In God's hour."
+
+"Is the worm also the Son of God?"
+
+The soul stared downward into the green water, but did not answer. A
+look of strange trouble was in his eyes.
+
+"Is not the Grave on the hither side of Eternity?"
+
+Still no answer.
+
+"Does God whisper beneath the Tomb?"
+
+At this the Soul rose, and moved restlessly to and fro.
+
+"Tell me," resumed the Will, "what is Dissolution?"
+
+"It is the returning into dust of that which was dust."
+
+"And what is dust?"
+
+"The formless: the inchoate: the mass out of which the Potter makes new
+vessels, or moulds new shapes."
+
+"But _you_ do not go into dust?"
+
+"I came from afar: afar I go again."
+
+"But we--we shall be formless: inchoate?"
+
+"You shall be upbuilded."
+
+"How?"
+
+The Soul turned, and again sat by his comrade.
+
+"I know not," he said simply.
+
+"But if the Body go back to the dust, and the life that is in him be
+blown out like a wavering flame; and if you who came from afar, again
+return afar; what, then, for me, who am neither an immortal spirit nor
+yet of this frail human clan?"
+
+"God has need of you."
+
+"When--where?"
+
+"How can I tell what I cannot even surmise?"
+
+"Tell me, tell me this: if I am so wedded to the Body that, if he
+perish, I perish also, what resurrection can there be for me?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"Is it a resurrection for the Body if, after weeks, or years, or scores
+of years, his decaying dust is absorbed into the earth, and passes in a
+chemic change into the living world?"
+
+"No: that is not a resurrection: that is a transmutation."
+
+"Yet that is all. There is nothing else possible. Dust unto dust. As
+with the Body, so with the mind, the spirit of life, that which I am,
+the Will. In the Grave there is no fretfulness any more: neither any
+sorrow, or joy, or any thought, or dream, or fear, or hope whatsoever.
+Hath not God Himself said it, through the mouth of His prophet?"
+
+"I do not understand," murmured the Soul, troubled.
+
+"Because the Grave is not your portion."
+
+"But I, too, must know Death!"
+
+"Yes, truly--a change what was it?--a change from a dream of Beauty, to
+Beauty!"
+
+"God knows I would that we could go together--you, and he yonder, and I;
+or, if that cannot be, he being wholly mortal, then at the least you and
+I."
+
+"But we cannot. At least, so it seems to us. But I--I too am alive, I
+too have dreams and visions, I too have joys and hopes, I too have
+despairs. And for me--_nothing_. I am, at the end, as a blown flame."
+
+"It may not be so. Something has whispered to me at times that you and I
+are to be made one."
+
+"Tell me: can the immortal wed the mortal?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then how can we two wed, for I am mortal. My very life depends on the
+Body. A falling branch, a whelming wave, a sudden ill, and in a moment
+that which was is not. He, the Body, is suddenly become inert,
+motionless, cold, the perquisite of the Grave, the sport of the maggot
+and the worm: and I--I am a subsided wave, a vanished spiral of smoke, a
+little fugitive wind-eddy abruptly ended."
+
+"You know not what is the end any more than I do. In a moment we are
+translated."
+
+"Ah, is it so with you? O Soul, I thought that you had a profound
+surety!"
+
+"I know nothing: I believe."
+
+"Then it may be with you as with us?"
+
+"I know little: I believe."
+
+"When I am well I believe in new, full, rich, wonderful life--in life in
+the spiritual as well as the mortal sphere. And the Body, when he is
+ill, he, too, thinks of that which is your heritage. But if _you_ are
+not sure--if _you_ know nothing--may it not be that you, too, have fed
+upon dreams, and have dallied with Will-o'-the-wisp, and are an
+idle-blown flame even as I am, and have only a vaster spiritual outlook?
+May it not be that you, O Soul, are but a spiritual nerve in the dark,
+confused, brooding mind of Humanity? May it not be that you and I and
+the Body go down unto one end?"
+
+"Not so. There is the word of God."
+
+"We read it differently."
+
+"Yet the Word remains."
+
+"You believe in the immortal life?--You believe in Eternity?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then what is Eternity?"
+
+"Already you have asked me that!"
+
+"You believe in Eternity. What is Eternity?"
+
+"Continuity."
+
+"And what are the things of Eternity?"
+
+"Immortal desires."
+
+"Then what need for us who are mortal to occupy ourselves with what must
+be for ever beyond us?"
+
+Thereat, with a harsh laugh, the Will arose, and throwing his garments
+from him, plunged into the sunlit green water, with sudden cries of joy
+calling to the Body, who was still rejoicefully swimming in the
+sun-dazzle as he breasted the tide.
+
+An hour later we rose, and, silent again, once more resumed our way.
+
+
+IV
+
+It was about the middle of the afternoon that we moved inland, because
+of a difficult tract of cliff and bouldered shore. We followed the
+course of a brown torrent, and were soon under the shadow of the
+mountain. The ewes and lambs made incessantly that mournful crying,
+which in mountain solitudes falls from ledge to ledge as though it were
+no other than the ancient sorrow of the hills.
+
+Thence we emerged, walking among boulders green with moss and grey with
+lichen, often isled among bracken and shadowed by the wind-wavering
+birches, or the finger-leafed rowans already heavy with clusters of
+ruddy fruit. Sometimes we spoke of things which interested us: of the
+play of light and shadow in the swirling brown torrent along whose banks
+we walked, and by whose grayling-haunted pools we lingered often, to
+look at the beautiful shadowy unrealities of the perhaps not less
+shadowy reality which they mirrored: of the solemn dusk of the pines; of
+the mauve shadows which slanted across the scanty corn that lay in green
+patches beyond lonely crofts; of the travelling purple phantoms of
+phantom clouds, to us invisible, over against the mountain-breasts; of a
+solitary seamew, echoing the wave in that inland stillness.
+
+All these things gave us keen pleasure. The Body often laughed joyously,
+and talked of chasing the shadow till it should turn and leap into him,
+and he be a wild creature of the woods again, and be happy, knowing
+nothing but the incalculable hour. It is an old belief of the Gaelic
+hill-people.
+
+"If one yet older be true," said the Will, speaking to the Soul, "you
+and Shadow are one and the same. Nay, the mystery of the Trinity is
+symbolised here again--as in us three; for there is an ancient forgotten
+word of an ancient forgotten people, which means alike the Breath, the
+Shadow, and the Soul."[1]
+
+As we walked onward we became more silent. It was about the sixth hour
+from noon that we saw a little coast-town lying amid green pastures,
+overhung, as it seemed, by the tremulous blue band of the sea-line. The
+Body was glad, for here were friends, and he wearied for his kind. The
+Will and the Soul, too, were pleased, for now they shared the common lot
+of mortality, and knew weariness as well as hunger and thirst. So we
+moved towards the blue smoke of the homes.
+
+"The home of a wild dove, a branch swaying in the wind, is sweet to it;
+and the green bracken under a granite rock is home to a tired hind; and
+so we, who are wayfarers idler than these, which blindly obey the law,
+may well look to yonder village as our home for to-night."
+
+So spoke the Soul.
+
+The Body laughed blithely. "Yes," he added, "it is a cheerier home than
+the green bracken. Tell me, have you ever heard of The Three Companions
+of Night?"
+
+"The Three Companions of Night? I would take them to be Prayer, and
+Hope, and Peace."
+
+"So says the Soul--but what do _you_ say, O Will?"
+
+"I would take them to be Dream, and Rest, and Longing."
+
+"We are ever different," replied the Body, with a sigh, "for the Three
+Companions of whom I speak are Laughter, and Wine, and Love."
+
+"Perhaps we mean the same thing," muttered the Will, with a smile of
+bitter irony.
+
+We thought much of these words as we passed down a sandy lane hung with
+honeysuckles, which were full of little birds who made a sweet
+chittering.
+
+Prayer, and Hope, and Peace; Dream, and Rest, and Longing; Laughter, and
+Wine, and Love: were these analogues of the Heart's Desire?
+
+When we left the lane, where we saw a glow-worm emitting a pale fire as
+he moved through the green dusk in the shadow of the hedge, we came upon
+a white devious road. A young man stood by a pile of stones. He stopped
+his labour and looked at us. One of us spoke to him.
+
+"Why is it that a man like yourself, young and strong, should be doing
+this work, which is for broken men?"
+
+"Why are you breathing?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"We breathe to live," answered the Body, smiling blithely.
+
+"Well, I break stones to live."
+
+"Is it worth it?"
+
+"It's better than death."
+
+"Yes," said the Body slowly, "it is better than death."
+
+"Tell me," asked the Soul, "why is it better than death?"
+
+"Who wants not to want?"
+
+"Ah--it is the need to want, then, that is strongest!"
+
+The stone-breaker looked sullenly at the speaker.
+
+"If you're not anxious to live," he said, "will you give me what money
+you have? It is a pity good money should be wasted. I know well where I
+would be spending it this night of the nights," he added abruptly in
+Gaelic.
+
+The Body looked at him with curious eyes.
+
+"And where would you be spending it?" he asked, in the same language.
+
+"This is the night of the marriage of John Macdonald, the rich man from
+America, who has come back to his own town, and is giving a big night of
+it to all his friends, and his friends' friends."
+
+"Is that the John Macdonald who is marrying Elsie Cameron?" demanded the
+Body eagerly.
+
+"Ay, the same; though it may be the other daughter of Alastair Rua, the
+girl Morag."
+
+A flush rose to the face of the Body. His eyes sparkled.
+
+"It is Elsie," he said to the man.
+
+"Belike," the stone-breaker muttered indifferently.
+
+"Do you know where Alastair Rua and his daughters are?"
+
+"Yes, at Beann Marsanta Macdonald's big house of the One-Ash Farm."
+
+"Can you show me the way?"
+
+"I'm going that way."
+
+Thereat the Body turned to his comrades:
+
+"I love her," he said simply; "I love Morag Cameron."
+
+"She is not for your loving," answered the Will sharply; "for she has
+given troth to old Archibald Sinclair."
+
+The Body laughed.
+
+"Love is love," he said lightly.
+
+"Come," interrupted the Soul wearily; "we have loitered long enough. Let
+us go."
+
+We stood looking at the stone-breaker, who was gazing curiously at us.
+Suddenly he laughed.
+
+"Why do you laugh?" asked the Soul.
+
+"Well, I'm not for knowing that. But I'll tell you this: if you two wish
+to go into the town, you have only to follow this road. And if _you_
+want to come to One-Ash Farm, then you must come this other way with
+me."
+
+"Do not go," whispered the Soul.
+
+But the Body, with an impatient gesture, drew aside. "Leave me," he
+added: "I wish to go with this man. I will meet you to-morrow morning at
+the first bridge to the westward of the little town yonder, just where
+the stream slackens over the pebbles."
+
+With reluctant eyes the two companions saw their comrade leave. For a
+long time the Will watched him with a bitter smile. Redeeming love was
+in the longing eyes of the Soul.
+
+When the Body and the stone-breaker were alone, as they walked towards
+the distant farm-steading, where already were lights, and whence came a
+lowing of kye in the byres, for it was the milking hour, they spoke at
+intervals.
+
+"Who were those with you?" asked the man.
+
+"Friends. We have come away together."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Well, as you would say, to see the world."
+
+"To see the world?" The man laughed. "To see the world! Have you money?"
+
+"Enough for our needs."
+
+"Then you will see nothing. The world gives to them that already have,
+an' more than have."
+
+"What do you hope for to-night?"
+
+"To be drunk."
+
+"That is a poor thing to hope for. Better to think of the laugh and the
+joke by the fireside; and of food and drink, too, if you will: of the
+pipes, and dancing, and pretty girls."
+
+"Do as you like. As for me, I hope to be drunk."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why? Because I'll be another man then. I'll have forgotten all that I
+now remember from sunrise to sundown. Can you think what it is to break
+a hope in your heart each time you crack a stone on the roadside?
+That's what I am, a stone-breaker, an' I crack stones inside as well as
+outside. It's a stony place my heart, God knows."
+
+"You are young to speak like that, and you speak like a man who has
+known better days."
+
+"Oh, I'm ancient enough," said the man, with a short laugh.
+
+"What meaning does that have?"
+
+"What meaning? Well, it just means this, that I'm as old as the Bible.
+For there's mention o' me there. Only there I'm herding swine, an' here
+I'm breaking stones."
+
+"And is _your_ father living?"
+
+"Ay, he curses me o' Sabbaths."
+
+"Then it's not the same as the old story that is in the Bible?"
+
+"Oh, nothing's the same an' everything's the same--except when you're
+drunk, an' then it's only the same turned outside in. But see, yonder's
+the farm. Take my advice, an' drink. It's better than the fireside, it's
+better than food, it's better than kisses, ay it's better than love,
+it's as good as hate, an' it's the only thing you can drown in except
+despair."
+
+Soon after this the Body entered the house of the Beann Marsanta
+Macdonald, and with laughter and delight met Morag Cameron, and others
+whom his heart leaped to see.
+
+At midnight, the Will sat in a room in a little inn, and read out of two
+books, now out of one, now out of the other. The one was the Gaelic
+Bible, the other was in English and was called _The One Hope_.
+
+He rose, as the village clock struck twelve, and went to the window. A
+salt breath, pungent with tide-stranded seaweed, reached him. In the
+little harbour, thin shadowy masts ascended like smoke and melted. A
+green lantern swung from one. The howling of a dog rose and fell. A
+faint lapping of water was audible. On a big fishing-coble some men were
+laughing and cursing.
+
+Overhead was an oppressive solemnity. The myriad stars were as the
+incalculable notes of a stilled music, become visible in silence. It was
+a relief to look into unlighted deeps.
+
+"These idle lances of God pierce the mind, slay the spirit," the Will
+murmured, staring with dull anger at the white multitude.
+
+"If the Soul were here," he added bitterly, "he would look at these
+glittering mockeries as though they were harbingers of eternal hope. To
+me they are whited sepulchres. They say _we live_, to those who die;
+they say _God endures,_ to Man that perisheth; they whisper the Immortal
+Hope to Mortality." Turning, he went back to where he had left the
+books. He lifted one, and read:--
+
+"_Have we not the word of God Himself that Time and Chance happeneth to
+all: that soon or late we shall all be caught in a net, we whom Chance
+hath for his idle sport, and upon whom Time trampleth with impatient
+feet? Verily, the rainbow is not more frail, more fleeting, than this
+drear audacity._"
+
+With a sigh he put the book down, and lifted the other. Having found the
+page he sought, he read slowly aloud:--
+
+"_... but Time and Chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth
+not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the
+birds that are caught in the snare, even so are the sons of men snared
+in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them._"
+
+He went to the window again, brooding darkly. A slight sound caught his
+ear. He saw a yellow light run out, leap across the pavement and pass
+like a fan of outblown flame. Then the door closed, and we heard a step
+on the stone flags. He looked down. The Soul was there.
+
+"Are you restless? Can you not sleep?" he asked.
+
+"No, dear friend. But my heart is weary because of the Body. Yet before
+I go, let me bid you read that which follows upon what you have just
+read. It is not only Time and Chance upon which to dwell; but upon this,
+that God knows that which He does, and the hour and the way, and sees
+the end in the beginning."
+
+And while the Soul moved softly down the little windy street, the Will
+opened the Book again, and read as the Soul had bidden.
+
+"It may be so," he muttered, "it may be that the dreamer may yet wake to
+behold his dream--As thou knowest not what is the way of the wind, even
+so thou knowest not the work of God Who doeth all?"
+
+With that he sighed wearily, and then, afraid to look again at the
+bitter eloquence of the stars, lit a candle as he lay down on his bed,
+and watched the warm companionable flame till sleep came upon him, and
+he dreamed no more of the rue and cypress, but plucked amaranths in the
+moonshine.
+
+Meanwhile the Soul walked swiftly to the outskirts of the little town,
+and out by the grassy links where clusters of white geese huddled in
+sleep, and across the windy common where a tethered ass stood, with
+drooping head, his long, twitching ears now motionless. In the
+moonlight, the shadow of the weary animal stretched to fantastic
+lengths, and at one point, when the startled Soul looked at it, he
+beheld the shadow of the Cross.
+
+When he neared One-Ash Farm he heard a loud uproar from within. Many
+couples were still dancing, and the pipes and a shrill flute added to
+the tumult. Others sang and laughed, or laughed and shouted, or cursed
+hoarsely. Through the fumes of smoke and drink rippled women's laughter.
+
+He looked in at a window, with sad eyes. The first glance revealed to
+him the Body, his blue eyes aflame, his face flushed with wine, his left
+arm holding close to his heart a bright winsome lass, with hair
+dishevelled, and wild eyes, but with a wonderful laughing eagerness of
+joy.
+
+In vain he called. His voice was suddenly grown faint. But what the ear
+could not hear, the heart heard. The Body rose abruptly.
+
+"I will drink no more," he said.
+
+A loud insensate laugh resounded near him. The stone-breaker lounged
+heavily from a bench, upon the servant's table.
+
+"I am drunk now, my friend," the man cried with flaming eyes. "I am
+drunk, an' now I am as reckless as a king, an' as serene as the Pope,
+an' as heedless as God."
+
+The Soul turned his gaze and looked at him. He saw a red flame rising
+from grey ashes. The ashes were his heart. The flame was his impotent,
+perishing life.
+
+Stricken with sorrow, the Soul went to the door, and entered. He went
+straight to the stone-breaker, who was now lying with head and arms
+prone on the deal table.
+
+He whispered in the drunkard's ear. The man lifted his head, and stared
+with red, brutish eyes.
+
+"What is that?" he cried.
+
+"Your mother was pure and holy. She died to give you her life. What will
+it be like on the day she asks for it again?"
+
+The man raised an averting arm. There was a stare of horror in his eyes.
+
+"I know you, you devil. Your name is Conscience."
+
+The Soul looked at the Speaker. "I do not know," he answered simply;
+"but I believe in God."
+
+"In the love of God?"
+
+"In the love of God."
+
+"He dwells everywhere?"
+
+"Everywhere."
+
+"Then I will find Him, I will find His love, _here_"--and with that the
+man raised the deathly spirit to his lips again, and again drank. Then,
+laughing and cursing, he threw the remainder at the feet of his unknown
+friend.
+
+"Farewell!" he shouted hoarsely, so that those about him stared at him
+and at the new-comer.
+
+The Soul turned sadly, and looked for his strayed comrade, but he was
+nowhere to be seen. In a room upstairs that friend whom he loved was
+whispering eager vows of sand and wind; and the girl Morag, clinging
+close to him, tempted him as she herself was tempted, so that both stood
+in that sand, and in the intertangled hair of each that wind blew.
+
+The Soul saw, and understood. None spoke to him, a stranger, as he went
+slowly from the house, though all were relieved when that silent,
+sad-eyed foreigner withdrew.
+
+Outside, the cool sea-wind fell freshly upon him. He heard a corncrake
+calling harshly to his mate, where the corn was yellowing in a little
+stone-dyked field; and a night-jar creeping forward on a juniper,
+uttering his whirring love-note; and he blessed their sweet, innocent
+lust. Then, looking upward, he watched for a while the white procession
+of the stars. They were to him the symbolic signs of the mystery of God.
+He bowed his head. "Dust of the world," he muttered humbly, "dust of
+the world."
+
+Moving slowly by the house--so doubly noisy, so harshly discordant,
+against the large, serene, nocturnal life--he came against the gable of
+an open window. On the ledge lay a violin, doubtless discarded by some
+reveller. The Soul lifted it, and held it up to the night-wind. When it
+was purified, and the vibrant wood was as a nerve in that fragrant
+darkness, he laid it on his shoulder and played softly.
+
+What was it that he played? Many heard it, but none knew what the strain
+was, or whence it came. The Soul remembered, and played. It is enough.
+
+The soft playing stole into the house as though it were the cool
+sea-wind, as though it were the flowing dusk. Beautiful, unfamiliar
+sounds, and sudden silences passing sweet, filled the rooms. The last
+guests left hurriedly, hushed, strangely disquieted. The dwellers in the
+farmstead furtively bade good-night, and slipt away.
+
+For an hour, till the sinking of the moon, the Soul played. He played
+the Song of Dreams, the Song of Peace, the three Songs of Mystery. The
+evil that was in the house ebbed. Everywhere, at his playing, the
+secret obscure life awoke. Nimble aerial creatures swung, invisibly
+passive, in the quiet dark. From the brown earth, from hidden
+sanctuaries in rocks and trees, green and grey lives slid, and stood
+intent. Out of the hillside came those of old. There were many eager
+voices, like leaves lapping in a wind. The wild-fox lay down, with red
+tongue lolling idly: the stag rose from the fern, with dilated nostrils;
+the night-jar ceased, the corncrake ceased, the moon-wakeful thrushes
+made no single thrilling note. The silence deepened. Sleep came stealing
+softly out of the obscure, swimming dusk. There was not a swaying reed,
+a moving leaf. The strange company of shadows stood breathless. Among
+the tree-tops the loosened stars shone terribly--lonely fires of
+silence.
+
+The Soul played. Once he thought of the stone-breaker. He played into
+his heart. The man stirred, and tears oozed between his heavy lids. It
+was his mother's voice that he heard, singing-low a cradle-sweet song,
+and putting back her white hair that she might look earthward to her
+love. "Grey sweetheart, grey sweetheart," he moaned. Then his heart
+lightened, and a moonlight of peace hallowed that solitary waste place.
+
+Again, at the last, the Soul thought of his comrade, heavy with wine in
+the room overhead, drunken with desire. And to him he played the
+imperishable beauty of Beauty, the Immortal Love, so that, afterwards,
+he should remember the glory rather than the shame of his poor frailty.
+What he played to the girl's heart only those women know who hear the
+whispering words of Mary the Mother in sleep, when a second life
+breathes beneath each breath.
+
+When he ceased, deep slumber was a balm upon all. He fell upon his knees
+and prayed.
+
+"Beauty of all Beauty," he prayed, "let none perish without thee."
+
+It was thus that we three, who were one, realised how Prayer and Hope
+and Peace, how Dream and Rest and Longing, how Laughter and Wine and
+Love, are in truth but shadowy analogues of the Heart's Desire.
+
+
+V
+
+At dawn we woke. A movement of gladness was in the lovely tides of
+morning--delicate green, and blue, and gold. The spires of the grasses
+were washed in dew; the innumerous was as one green flower that had lain
+all night in the moonshine.
+
+We had agreed to meet at the bridge over the stream where it lapsed
+through gravelly beaches just beyond the little town.
+
+There the Soul and the Will long awaited the Body. The sun was an hour
+risen, and had guided a moving multitude of gold and azure waters
+against the long reaches of yellow-poppied sand, and to the bases of the
+great cliffs, whose schist shone like chrysolite, and whose dreadful
+bastions of black basalt loomed in purple shadow, like suspended
+thunder-clouds on a windless afternoon.
+
+The air was filled with the poignant sweetness of the loneroid or
+bog-myrtle, meadow-sweet, and white wild-roses. The green smell of the
+bracken, the delicate woodland odour of the mountain-ash, floated
+hitherward and thitherward on the idle breath of the wind, sunwarm when
+it came across the sea-pinks and thyme-set grass, cool and fresh when it
+eddied from the fern-coverts, or from the heather above the
+hillside-boulders where the sheep lay, or from under the pines at the
+bend of the sea-road where already the cooing of grey doves made an
+indolent sweetness.
+
+The Soul was silent. He had not slept, but, after his playing in the
+dark, peace had come to him.
+
+Before dawn he had gone into the room where the Will lay, and had
+looked long at his comrade. In sleep the Will more resembled him, as
+when awake he the more resembled the Body. A deep pity had come upon the
+Soul for him whom he loved so well, but knew so little.
+
+Why was it, he wondered, that he felt less alien from the Body? Why was
+it that this strange, potent, inscrutable being, whom both loved, should
+be so foreign to each? The Body feared him. As for himself, he, too,
+feared him at times. There were moments when all his marvellous
+background of the immortal life shrank before the keen gaze of his
+friend. Was it possible that Mind could have a life apart from mortal
+substances? Was it possible? If so----
+
+It was here that the Will awoke, and smiled at his friend.
+
+He gave no greeting, but answered his thought.
+
+"Yes," he said gravely, and as though continuing an argument, "it is
+impossible, if you mean the mortal substance of our brother, the Body.
+But yet not without material substance. May it not be that the Mind may
+have an undreamed-of shaping power, whereby it can instantly create?"
+
+"Create what?"
+
+"A new environment for its need? Drown it in the deepest gulfs of the
+sea, and it will, at the moment it is freed from the body, sheathe
+itself in a like shape, and habit itself with free spaces of air, so
+that it may breathe, and live, and emerge into the atmosphere, there to
+take on a new shape, to involve itself in new circumstances, to live
+anew?"
+
+"It is possible. But would that sea-change leave the mind the same or
+another?"
+
+"The Mind would come forth one and incorruptible."
+
+"If in truth, the Mind be an indivisible essence?"
+
+"Yes, if the mind be one and indivisible."
+
+"You believe it so?"
+
+"Tell me, are you insubstantial? You, yourself, below this accident of
+mortality?"
+
+"I know not what you mean."
+
+"You were wondering if, after all, it were possible for me to have a
+life, a conscious, individual continuity, apart from this mortal
+substance in which you and I now share--counterparts of that human home
+we both love and hate, that moving tent of the Illimitable, which at
+birth appears a speck on sands of the Illimitable, and at death again
+abruptly disappears. You were wondering this. But, tell me: have you
+yourself never wondered how you can exist, as yourself, apart from
+something of this very actuality, this form, this materialism to which
+you find yourself so alien in the Body?"
+
+"I am spirit. I am a breath."
+
+"But you are you?"
+
+"Yes, I am I."
+
+"The surpassing egotism is the same, whether in you, the Soul, who are
+but a breath; or in me, the Will, who am but a condition; or in our
+brother, the Body, a claimant to Eternal Life while perishing in his
+mortality!"
+
+"I live in God. Whence I came, thither shall I return."
+
+"A breath?"
+
+"It may be."
+
+"Yet you shall be you?"
+
+"Yes; I."
+
+"Then that breath which will be you must have form, even as the Body
+must have form."
+
+"Form is but the human formula for the informulate."
+
+"Nay, Form _is_ life."
+
+"You have ever one wish, it seems to me, O Will: to put upon me the
+heavy yoke of mortality."
+
+"Not so: but to lift it from myself."
+
+"And the Body?"
+
+"Where did you leave him last night?"
+
+"You remember what he said about the Three Companions of Night:
+Laughter, and Wine, and Love? I left him with these."
+
+"They are also called Tears, and Weariness, and the Grave. He has his
+portion. Perhaps he does well. Death intercepts many retributions."
+
+"He, too, has his dream within a dream."
+
+"Yes, you played to it, in the silence and the darkness."
+
+"You heard my playing--you here, I there?"
+
+"I heard."
+
+"And did you sleep or wake, comforted?"
+
+"I heard a Wind. I have heard it often. I heard, too, my own voice
+singing in the dark."
+
+"What was the song?"
+
+"This:--
+
+    In the silences of the woods
+    I have heard all day and all night
+    The moving multitudes
+    Of the Wind in flight.
+    He is named Myriad:
+    And I am sad
+    Often, and often I am glad;
+    But oftener I am white
+    With fear of the dim broods
+    That are his multitudes."
+
+"And then, when you had heard that song?"
+
+"There was a rush of wings. My hair streamed behind me. Then a sudden
+stillness, out of which came moonlight; and a star fell slowly through
+the dark, and as it passed my face I felt lips pressed against mine, and
+it seemed to me that you kissed me."
+
+"And when I kissed you, did I whisper any word?"
+
+"You whispered: '_I am the Following Love._'"
+
+"And you knew then that it was the Breath of God, and you had deep
+peace, and slept?"
+
+"I knew that it was the Following Love,--that is the Breath of God, and
+I had deep peace, and I slept."
+
+The Soul crossed from the window to the bed, and stooped, and kissed the
+Will.
+
+"Beloved," he whispered, "the star was but a dewdrop of the Peace that
+passeth understanding. And can it be that to you, to whom the healing
+dew was vouchsafed, shall be denied the water-springs?"
+
+"Ah, beautiful dreamer of dreams, bewilder me no more with your lovely
+sophistries. See, it is already late, and we have to meet the Body at
+the shore-bridge over the little stream!"
+
+
+It was then that the two, having had a spare meal of milk and new bread,
+left the inn, and went, each communing with his own thoughts, to the
+appointed place.
+
+They heard the Body before they saw him, for he was singing as he came.
+It was a strange, idle fragment of a song--"The Little Children of the
+Wind"--a song that some one had made, complete in its incompleteness, as
+a wind-blown blossom, and, as a blossom discarded by a flying bird,
+thrown heedlessly on the wayside by its unknown wandering singer:--
+
+    I hear the little children of the wind
+    Crying solitary in lonely places:
+    I have not seen their faces,
+    But I have seen the leaves eddying behind,
+    The little tremulous leaves of the wind.
+
+The Soul looked at the Will.
+
+"So he, too, has heard the Wind," he said softly.
+
+
+VI
+
+All that day we journeyed westward. Sometimes we saw, far off, the pale
+blue films of the Hills of Dream, those elusive mountains towards which
+our way was set. Sometimes they were so startlingly near that, from
+gorse upland or inland valley, we thought we saw the shadow-grass shake
+in the wind's passage, or smelled the thyme still wet with dew where it
+lay under the walls of mountain-boulders. But at noon we were no nearer
+than when, at sunrise, we had left the little sea-town behind us: and
+when the throng of bracken-shadows filled the green levels between the
+fern and the pines--like flocks of sheep following fantastic
+herdsmen--the Hills of the West were still as near, and as far, as the
+bright raiment of the rainbow which the shepherd sees lying upon his
+lonely pastures.
+
+But long before noon we were glad because of what happened to one of us.
+
+The dawn had flushed into a wilderness of rose as we left the bridge by
+the stream. Long shafts of light, plumed with pale gold, were flung up
+out of the east: everywhere was the tremulous awakening of the new day.
+A score of yards from the highway a cottage stood, sparrows stirring in
+the thatch, swift fairy-spiders running across the rude white-washed
+walls, a redbreast singing in the dew-drenched fuchsia-bush. The blue
+peat-smoke which rose above it was so faint as to be invisible beyond
+the rowan which stood sunways. The westward part of the cottage was a
+byre: we could hear the lowing of a cow, the clucking of fowls.
+
+In every glen, on each hillside, are crofts such as this. There was
+nothing unusual in what we saw, save that a collie crouched whimpering
+beyond a dyke on the farther side of the rowan.
+
+"All is not well here," said the Will.
+
+"No," murmured the Soul, "I see the shadowy footsteps of those who serve
+the Evil One. Await me here."
+
+With that the Soul walked swiftly towards the cottage, and looked in at
+the little window. His thought was straightway ours, and we knew that a
+woman lay within and was about to give birth to a child. We knew, also,
+that those who had dark, cruel eyes, and wore each the feather of a
+hawk, had no power within, but were baffled, and roamed restlessly
+outside the cottage on the side of shadow. The _Fuath_ himself was not
+there, but when his call came the evil spirits rose like a flock of
+crows and passed away. Then we saw our comrade stand back, and bow down,
+and fall upon his knees.
+
+When he rejoined us we were for a moment as one, and saw seven tall and
+beautiful spirits, starred and flame-crested, hand-clasped and standing
+circlewise round the cottage. They were Sons of Joy, who sang because in
+that mortal hour was born an immortal soul who in the white flame and
+the red of mortal life was to be a spirit of gladness and beauty. For
+there is no joy in the domain of the Spirit like that of the birth of a
+new joy.
+
+A long while we walked in silence. In the eyes of the Soul we saw a
+divine and beautiful light: in the eyes of the Will we saw
+rainbow-spanned depths: in the eyes of the Body we saw gladness.
+
+"We are one!"
+
+None knew who spoke. For a moment I heard my own voice, saw my own
+shadow in the grass; then, in the twinkling of an eye, three stood,
+looking at each other with startled gaze.
+
+"Let us go," said the Soul; "we have a long way yet to travel."
+
+Each dreaming his own dream, we walked onward. Suddenly the Soul turned
+and looked in the eyes of the Body.
+
+"You are thinking of your loneliness," he said gravely.
+
+"Yes," answered the Body.
+
+"And I too," said the Will.
+
+For a time no word more was said.
+
+"I am indeed alone." This I murmured to myself after a long while, and
+in a moment the old supreme wisdom sank, and we were not one but three.
+
+"But you, O Soul," said the Will, "how can you be alone when in every
+hour you have the company of the invisible, and see the passage of
+powers and influence, of demons and angels, creatures of the triple
+universe, souls, and the pale flight of the unembodied?"
+
+"I do not know loneliness because of what I see or do not see, but
+because of what I feel. When I walk here with you side by side it is as
+though I walked along a narrow shore between a fathomless sea and
+fathomless night."
+
+The thought of one was the thought of three. I shivered with that great
+loneliness. The Body glanced sidelong at the Will, the Will at the Soul.
+
+"It is not good to dwell upon that loneliness," said the last.
+
+"To you, O Body, and to you, O Will, as to me, it is the signal of Him
+whom we have lost. Listen, and in the deepest hollow of loneliness we
+can hear the voice of the Shepherd."
+
+"I hear nothing," said the Body.
+
+"I hear an echo," said the Will: "I hear an echo; but so, too, I can
+hear the authentic voice of the sea in a hollow shell. Authentic! ...
+when I know well that the murmur is no eternal voice, no whisper of the
+wave made one with pearly silence, but only the sound of my flowing
+blood heard idly in the curves of ear and shell?"
+
+"Ah!" ... cried the Body, "it is a lie, that cruel word of science. The
+shell must ever murmur of the sea; if not, at least let us dream that it
+does. Soon, soon we shall have no dream left. How am I to know that
+_all_, that everything, is not but an idle noise in my ears? How am I to
+know that the Hope of the Will, and the Voice of the Soul, and the
+message of the Word, and the Whisper of the Eternal Spirit, are not one
+and all but a mocking echo in that shell which for me is the Shell of
+Life, but may be only the cold inhabitation of my dreams?"
+
+"Yet were it not for these echoes," the Soul answered, "life would be
+intolerable for you, as for you too, my friend."
+
+The Will smiled scornfully.
+
+"Dreams are no comfort, no solace, no relief from weariness even, if one
+knows them to be no more than the spray above the froth of a distempered
+mind."
+
+Suddenly one of us began in a low voice a melancholy little song:--
+
+    I hear the sea-song of the blood in my heart,
+    I hear the sea-song of the blood in my ears;
+    And I am far apart,
+    And lost in the years.
+
+    But when I lie and dream of that which was
+    Before the first man's shadow flitted on the grass--
+    I am stricken dumb
+    With sense of that to come.
+
+    Is then this wildering sea-song but a part
+    Of the old song of the mystery of the years--
+    Or only the echo of the tired Heart
+    And of Tears?
+
+But none answered, and so again we walked onward, silent. The wind had
+fallen, and in the noon-heat we began to grow weary. It was with relief
+that we saw the gleam of water between the branches of a little wood of
+birches, which waded towards it through a tide of bracken. Beyond the
+birks shimmered a rainbow; a stray cloud had trailed from glen to glen,
+and suddenly broken among the tree-tops.
+
+"There goes Yesterday!" cried the Body laughingly--alluding to the
+saying that the morning rainbow is the ghost of the day that passed at
+dawn. The next moment he broke into a fragment of song:--
+
+    Brother and Sister, wanderers they
+    Out of the Golden Yesterday--
+    Thro' the dusty Now and the dim To-morrow
+    Hand-in-hand go Joy and Sorrow.
+
+"Yes, joy and sorrow, O glad Body," exclaimed the Will--"but it is the
+joy only that is vain as the rainbow, which has no other message. It
+should be called the Bow of Sorrow."
+
+"Not so," said the Soul gently, "or, if so, not as you mean, dear
+friend:--
+
+    It is not Love that gives the clearest sight:
+    For out of bitter tears, and tears unshed,
+    Riseth the Rainbow of Sorrow overhead,
+    And 'neath the Rainbow is the clearest light.
+
+The Will smiled:--
+
+"I too must have my say, dear poets:--
+
+    Where rainbows rise through sunset rains
+      By shores forlorn of isles forgot,
+    A solitary Voice complains
+      'The World is here, the World is not.'
+
+    The Voice may be the wind, or sea,
+      Or spirit of the sundown West:
+    Or, mayhap, some sweet air set free
+      From off the Islands of the Blest:
+
+    It may be; but I turn my face
+      To that which still I hold so dear;
+    And lo, the voices of the days--
+      'The World is not, the World is here.'
+
+    'Tis the same end whichever way
+      And either way is soon forgot:
+    The World is all in all, To-day:
+      'To-morrow all the World is not.'
+
+
+VII
+
+In the noon-heat we lay, for rest and coolness, by the pool, and on the
+shadow-side of a hazel. The water was of so dark a brown that we knew it
+was of a great depth, and, indeed, even at the far verge, a heron,
+standing motionless, wetted her breast-feathers.
+
+In the mid-pool, where the brown lawns sloped into depths of
+purple-blue, we could see a single cloud, invisible otherwise where we
+lay. Nearer us, the water mirrored a mountain-ash heavy with ruddy
+clusters. That long, feathery foliage, that reddening fruit, hung in a
+strange, unfamiliar air; the stranger, that amid the silence of those
+phantom branches ever and again flitted furtive shadow-birds.
+
+We had walked for hours, and were now glad to rest. With us we had
+brought oaten bread and milk, and were well content.
+
+"It was by a pool such as this," said one of us, after a long interval,
+"that dreamers of old called to Connla, and Connla heard. That was the
+mortal name of one whose name we know not."
+
+"Call him now," whispered the Body eagerly.
+
+The Soul leaned forward, and stared into the fathomless brown dusk.
+
+"Speak, Connla! Who art thou?"
+
+Clear as a Sabbath-bell across windless pastures we heard a voice:
+
+"I am of those who wait yet a while. I am older than all age, for my
+youth is Wisdom; and I am younger than all youth, for I am named
+To-morrow."
+
+We heard no more. In vain, together, separately, we sought to break that
+silence which divides the mortal moment from hourless time. The Soul
+himself could not hear, or see, or even remember, because of that mortal
+raiment of the flesh which for a time he had voluntarily taken upon
+himself.
+
+"I will tell you a dream that is not all a dream," he said at last,
+after we had lain a long while pondering what that voice had uttered,
+that voice which showed that the grave held a deeper mystery than
+silence.
+
+The Will looked curiously at him.
+
+"Is it a dream wherein we have shared?" he asked slowly.
+
+"That I know not: yet it may well be so. I call my dream 'The Sons of
+Joy.' If you or the Body have also dreamed, let each relate the dream."
+
+"Yes," said the Body, "I have dreamed it. But I would call it rather
+'The Sons of Delight.'"
+
+"And I," said the Will, "The Sons of Silence."
+
+"Tell it," said the Soul, looking towards the Body.
+
+"It was night," answered the Body at once: "and I was alone in a waste
+place. My feet were entangled among briars and thorns, and beside me was
+a quagmire. On the briar grew a great staff, and beside it a circlet of
+woven thorn. I could see them, in a soft, white light. It must have been
+moonlight, for on the other side of the briar I saw, in the moonshine, a
+maze of wild roses. They were lovely and fragrant. I would have liked to
+take the staff, but it was circled with the thorn-wreath; so I turned to
+the moonshine and the wild roses. It was then that I saw a multitude of
+tall and lovely figures, men and women, all rose-crowned, and the pale,
+beautiful faces of the women with lips like rose-leaves. They were
+singing. It was the Song of Delight. I, too, sang. And as I sang, I
+wondered, for I thought that the eyes of those about me were heavy with
+love and dreams, as though each had been pierced with a shadowy thorn.
+But still the song rose, and I knew that the flowers in the grass
+breathed to it, and that the vast slow cadence of the stars was its
+majestic measure. Then the dawn broke, and I saw all the company, winged
+and crested with the seven colours, press together, so that a rainbow
+was upbuilded. In the middle space below the rainbow, a bird sang. Then
+I knew I was that bird; and as the rainbow vanished, and the dawn grew
+grey and chill, I sank to the ground. But it was all bog and swamp. I
+knew I should sing no more. But I heard voices saying: 'O happy,
+wonderful bird, who has seen all delight, whose song was so rapt, sing,
+sing, sing!' But when I could sing no more I was stoned, and lay dead.
+
+"That was my dream."
+
+The Soul sighed.
+
+"It was not thus I dreamed," he murmured; "but thus:--
+
+"I stood, at night, on the verge of the sea, and looked at the maze of
+stars. And while looking and dreaming, I heard voices, and, turning,
+beheld a multitude of human beings. All were sorrowful; many were heavy
+with weariness and despair; all suffered from some grievous ill. Among
+them were many who cried continually that they had no thought, or dream,
+no wish, but to forget all, and be at rest:
+
+"I called to them, asking whither they were bound?
+
+"'We are journeying to the Grave,' came the sighing answer.
+
+"Then suddenly I saw the Grave. An angel stood at the portals. He was so
+beautiful that the radiance of the light upon his brow lit that
+shoreless multitude; in every heart a little flame arose. The name of
+that divine one was Hope.
+
+"As shadow by shadow slipt silently into the dark road behind the Grave,
+I saw the Angel touch for a moment every pale brow.
+
+"I knew at last that I saw beyond the Grave. Infinite ways traversed the
+universe, wherein suns and moons and stars hung like fruit. Multitude
+within multitude was there.
+
+"Then, again, suddenly I stood where I had been, and saw the Grave
+reopen, and from it troop back a myriad of bright and beautiful beings.
+I could see that some were souls re-born, some were lovely thoughts,
+dreams, hopes, aspirations, influences, powers and mighty spirits too.
+And all sang:
+
+"'We are the Sons of Joy.'
+
+"That was my dream."
+
+We were still for a few moments. Then the Will spoke.
+
+"This dream of ours is one thing as the Body's, and another as the
+Soul's. It is yet another, as I remember it:--
+
+"On a night of a cold silence, when the breath of the equinox sprayed
+the stars into a continuous dazzle, I heard the honk of the wild geese
+as they cleft their way wedgewise through the gulfs overhead.
+
+"In the twinkling of an eye I was beyond the last shadow of the last
+wing.
+
+"Before me lay a land solemn with auroral light. For a thousand years,
+that were as a moment, I wandered therein. Then, far before me, I saw an
+immense semi-circle of divine figures, tall, wonderful, clothed with
+moonfire, each with uplifted head, as a forest before a wind. To the
+right they held the East, and to the left the West.
+
+"'Who are you?' I cried, as I drifted through them like a mist of pale
+smoke.
+
+"'We are the Laughing Gods,' they answered.
+
+"Then after I had drifted on beyond the reach of sea or land, to a
+frozen solitude of ice, I saw again a vast concourse stretching
+crescent-wise from east to west: taller, more wonderful, crowned with
+stars, and standing upon dead moons white with perished time.
+
+"'Who are you?' I cried, as I went past them like a drift of pale smoke.
+
+"'We are the Gods who laugh not,' they answered.
+
+"Then when I had drifted beyond the silence of the Pole, and there was
+nothing but unhabitable air, and the dancing fires were a flicker in the
+pale sheen far behind, I saw again a vast concourse stretching
+crescent-wise from east to west. They were taller still; they were more
+wonderful still. They were crowned with flaming suns, and their feet
+were white with the dust of ancient constellations.
+
+"'Who are you!' I cried, as I went past them like a mist of pale smoke.
+
+"'We are the Gods,' they answered.
+
+"And while I waned into nothingness I felt in my nostrils the salt
+smell of the sea, and, listening, I heard the honk of the wild geese
+wedging southward.
+
+"That was my dream."
+
+When the Will ceased, nothing was said. We were too deeply moved by
+strange thoughts, one and all. Was it always to be thus ... that we
+might dream one dream, confusedly real, confusedly unreal, when we three
+were one; but that when each dreamed alone, the dream, the vision, was
+ever to be distinct in form and significance?
+
+We lay resting for long. After a time we slept. I cannot remember what
+then we dreamed, but I know that these three dreams were become one, and
+that what the Soul saw and what the Will saw and what the Body saw was a
+more near and searching revelation in this new and one dream than in any
+of the three separately. I pondered this, trying to remember: but the
+deepest dreams are always unrememberable, and leave only a fragrance, a
+sound as of a quiet footfall passing into silence, or a cry, or a sense
+of something wonderful, unimagined, or of light intolerable: but I could
+recall only the memory of a moment ... a moment wherein, in a flash of
+lightning, I had seen all, understood all.
+
+I rose ... there was a dazzle on the water, a shimmer on every leaf, a
+falling away as of walls of air into the great river of the wind ... and
+there were three, not one, each staring dazed at the other, in the ears
+of each the bewilderment of the already faint echo of that lost "I."
+
+
+VIII
+
+Towards sundown we came upon a hamlet, set among the hills. Our hearts
+had beat quicker as we drew near, for with the glory of light gathered
+above the west the mountains had taken upon them a bloom soft and
+wonderful, and we thought that at last we were upon the gates of the
+hills towards which we had journeyed so eagerly. But when we reached the
+last pines on the ridge we saw the wild doves flying far westward.
+Beyond us, under a pale star, dimly visible in a waste of rose, were the
+Hills of Dream.
+
+The Soul wished to go to them at once, for now they seemed so near to us
+that we might well reach them with the rising of the moon. But the
+others were tired, nor did the Hills seem so near to them. So we sat
+down by the peat-fire in a shepherd's cottage, and ate of milk and
+porridge, and talked with the man about the ways of that district, and
+the hills, and how best to reach them. "If you want work," he said,
+"you should go away south, where the towns are, an' not to these lonely
+hills. They are so barren, that even the goatherds no longer wander
+their beasts there."
+
+"It's said they're haunted," added the Body, seeing that the others did
+not speak.
+
+"Ay, sure enough. That's well known, master. An' for the matter o' that,
+there's a wood down there to the right where for three nights past I
+have seen figures and the gleaming of fire. But there isn't a soul in
+that wood--no, not a wandering tinker. I took my dogs through it to-day,
+an' there wasn't the sign even of a last-year's gypsy. As for the low
+bare hill beyond it, not a man, let alone a woman or child, would go
+near it in the dark. In the Gaelic it's called Maol Dè, that is to say,
+the Hill of God."
+
+For a long time we sat talking with the shepherd, for he told us of many
+things that were strange, and some that were beautiful, and some that
+were wild and terrible. One of his own brothers, after an evil life, had
+become mad, and even now lived in caves among the higher hills, going
+ever on hands and feet, and cursing by day and night because he was made
+as one of the wild swine, that know only hunger and rage and savage
+sleep. He himself tended lovingly his old father, who was too frail to
+work, and often could not sleep at nights because of the pleasant but
+wearying noise the fairies made as they met on the dancing-lawns among
+the bracken. Our friend had not himself heard the simple people, and in
+a whisper confided to us that he thought the old man was a bit mazed,
+and that what he heard was only the solitary playing of the Amadan-Dhu,
+who, it was known to all, roamed the shadows between the two dusks.
+"Keep away from the river in the hollow," he said at another moment,
+"for it's there, on a night like this, just before the full moon got up,
+that, when I was a boy, I saw the Aonaran. An' to this day, if I saw you
+or any one standing by the water, it 'ud be all I could do not to thrust
+you into it and drown you: ay, I'd have to throw myself on my face, an'
+bite the grass, an' pray till my soul shook the murder out at my throat.
+For that's the Aonaran's doing."
+
+Later, he showed us, when we noticed it, a bit of smooth coral that hung
+by a coarse leathern thong from his neck.
+
+"Is that an amulet?" one of us asked.
+
+"No: it's my lassie's."
+
+We looked at the man inquiringly.
+
+"The bairn's dead thirty years agone."
+
+In the silence that followed, one of us rose, and went with the shepherd
+into the little room behind. When the man came back it was with a
+wonderful light in his face. Our comrade did not return ... but when we
+glanced sidelong, lo, the Soul was there, as though he had not moved.
+Then, of a sudden, we knew what he had done, what he had said, and were
+glad.
+
+When we left (the shepherd wanted us to stay the night, but we would
+not), the stars had come. The night was full of solemn beauty.
+
+We went down by the wood of which the shepherd had spoken, and came upon
+it as the moon rose. But as a path bordered it, we followed that little
+winding white gleam, somewhat impatient now to reach those far hills
+where each of us believed he would find his heart's desire, or, at the
+least, have that vision of absolute Truth, of absolute Beauty, which we
+had set out to find.
+
+We had not gone a third of the way when the Body abruptly turned, waving
+to us a warning hand. When we stood together silent, motionless, we saw
+that we were upon a secret garden. We were among ilex, and beyond were
+tall cypresses, like dark flames rising out of the earth, their hither
+sides lit with wavering moonfire. Far away the hill-foxes barked.
+Somewhere near us in the dusk an owl hooted. The nested wild doves were
+silent. Once, the faint churr of a distant fern-owl sent a vibrant
+dissonance, that was yet strangely soothing, through the darkness and
+the silence.
+
+"Look!" whispered the Body.
+
+We saw, on a mossy slope under seven great cypresses, a man lying on the
+ground, asleep. The moonshine reached him as we looked, and revealed a
+face of so much beauty and of so great a sorrow that the heart ached.
+Nevertheless, there was so infinite a peace there, that, merely gazing
+upon it, our lives stood still. The moonbeam slowly passed from that
+divine face. I felt my breath rising and falling, like a feather before
+the mystery of the wind is come. Then, the further surprised, we saw
+that the sleeper was not alone. About him were eleven others, who also
+slept; but of these one sat upright, as though the watchman of the dark
+hour, slumbering at his post.
+
+While the Body stooped, whispering, we caught sight of the white face of
+yet another, behind the great bole of a tree. This man, the twelfth of
+that company which was gathered about the sleeper in its midst, stared,
+with uplifted hand. In his other hand, and lowered to the ground, was a
+torch. He stared upon the Sleeper.
+
+Slowly I moved forward. But whether in so doing, or by so doing, we
+broke some subtle spell, which had again made us as one, I know not.
+Suddenly three stood in that solitary place, with none beside us,
+neither sleeping nor watching, neither quick nor dead. Far off the
+hill-foxes barked. Among the cypress boughs an owl hooted, and was
+still.
+
+"Have we dreamed?" each asked the other. Then the Body told what he had
+seen, and what heard; and it was much as is written here, only that the
+sleepers seemed to him worn and poor men, ill-clad, weary, and that
+behind the white face of the twelfth, who hid behind a tree, was a
+company of evil men with savage faces, and fierce eyes, and drawn
+swords.
+
+"I have seen nothing of all this," said the Will harshly, "but only a
+fire drowning in its own ashes, round which a maze of leaves circled
+this way and that, blown by idle winds."
+
+The Soul looked at the speaker. He sighed. "Though God were to sow
+living fires about you, O Will," he said, "you would not believe."
+
+The Will answered dully: "I have but one dream, one hope, and that is to
+believe. Do not mock me." The Soul leaned and kissed him lovingly on the
+brow.
+
+"Look," he said; "what I saw was this: I beheld, asleep, the Divine
+Love; not sleeping, as mortals sleep, but in a holy quiet, brooding upon
+infinite peace, and in commune with the Eternal Joy. Around him were the
+Nine Angels, the _Crois nan Aingeal_ of our prayers, and two
+Seraphs--the Eleven Powers and Dominions of the World. And One stared
+upon them, and upon Him, out of the dark wood, with a face white with
+despair, that great and terrible Lord of Shadow whom some call Death,
+and some Evil, and some Fear, and some the Unknown God. Behind him was a
+throng of demons and demoniac creatures: and all died continually. And
+the wood itself--it was an infinite forest; a forest of human souls
+awaiting God."
+
+The Will listened, with eyes strangely ashine. Suddenly he fell upon his
+knees, and prayed. We saw tears falling from his eyes.
+
+"I am blind and deaf," he whispered in the ear of the Body, as he rose;
+"but, lest I forget, tell me where I am, in what place we are."
+
+"It is a garden called Gethsemane," answered the other--though I know
+not how he knew--I--we--as we walked onward in silence through the dusk
+of moon and star, and saw the gossamer-webs whiten as they became
+myriad, and hang heavy with the pale glister of the dews of dawn.
+
+
+IX
+
+The morning twilight wavered, and it was as though an incalculable host
+of grey doves fled upward and spread earthward before a wind with
+pinions of rose: then the dappled dove-grey vapour faded, and the rose
+hung like the reflection of crimson fire, and dark isles of ruby and
+straits of amethyst and pale gold and saffron and April-green came into
+being: and the new day was come.
+
+We stood silent. There is a beauty too great. We moved slowly round by
+the low bare hill beyond the wood. No one was there, but on the summit
+stood three crosses; one, midway, so great that it threw a shadow from
+the brow of the East to the feet of the West.
+
+The Soul stopped. He seemed as one rapt. We looked upon him with awe,
+for his face shone as though from a light within. "Listen," he
+whispered, "I hear the singing of the Sons of Joy. Farewell: I shall
+come again."
+
+We were alone, we two. Silently we walked onward. The sunrays slid
+through the grass, birds sang, the young world that is so old smiled:
+but we had no heed for this. In that new solitude each almost hated the
+other. At noon a new grief, a new terror, came to us. We were upon a
+ridge, looking westward. There were no hills anywhere.
+
+Doubtless the Soul had gone that way which led to them. For us ... they
+were no longer there.
+
+"Let us turn and go home," said the Body wearily.
+
+The Will stood and thought.
+
+"Let us go home," he said.
+
+With that he turned, and walked hour after hour. It was by a road
+unknown to us, for, not noting where we went, we had traversed a path
+that led us wide of that by which we had come. At least we saw nothing
+of it. Nor, at dusk, would the Will go further, nor agree even to seek
+for a path that might lead to the garden called Gethsemane.
+
+"We are far from it," he said, "if indeed there be any such place. It
+was a dream, and I am weary of all dreams. When we are home again, O
+Body, we will dream no more."
+
+The Body was silent, then abruptly laughed. His comrade looked at him
+curiously.
+
+"Why do you laugh?"
+
+"Did you not say there would be no more tears? And of that I am glad."
+
+"You did not laugh gladly. But what I said was that there shall be no
+more dreams for us, that we will dream no more."
+
+"It is the same thing. We have tears because we dream. If we hope no
+more, we dream no more: if we dream no more, we weep no more. And I
+laughed because of this: that if we weep no more we can live as we like,
+without thought of an impossible to-morrow, and with little thought even
+for to-day."
+
+For a time we walked in brooding thought, but slowly, because of the
+gathering dark. Neither spoke, until the Body suddenly stood still,
+throwing up his arms.
+
+"Oh, what a fool I have been! What a fool I have been!"
+
+The Will made no reply. He stared before him into the darkness.
+
+We had meant to rest in the haven of the great oaks, but a thin rain had
+begun, and we shivered with the chill. The thought came to us to turn
+and find our way back to the house of the shepherd, hopeless as the
+quest might prove, for we were more and more bewildered as to where we
+were, or even as to the direction in which we moved, being without pilot
+of moon or star, and having already followed devious ways. But while we
+were hesitating, we saw a light. The red flame shone steadily through
+the rainy gloom, so we knew that it was no lantern borne by a
+fellow-wayfarer. In a brief while we came upon it, and saw that it was
+from a red lamp burning midway in a forest chapel.
+
+We lifted the latch and entered. There was no one visible. Nor was any
+one in the sacristy. We went to the door again, and looked vainly in all
+directions for light which might reveal a neighbouring village, or
+hamlet, or even a woodlander's cottage.
+
+Glad as we were of the shelter, and of the glow from the lamp, a
+thought, a dream, a desire, divided us. We looked at each other
+sidelong, each both seeking and avoiding the other's eyes.
+
+"I cannot stay here," said the Body at last; "the place stifles me. I am
+frightened to stay. The path outside is clear and well trodden; it must
+lead somewhere, and as this chapel is here, and as the lamp is lit, a
+village, or at least a house, cannot be far off."
+
+The Will looked at him.
+
+"Do not go," he said earnestly.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I do not know. But do not let us part. I dare not leave here. I feel as
+though this were our one safe haven to-night."
+
+The Body moved to the door and opened it.
+
+"I am going. And--and--I am going, too, because I am tired both of you
+and the Soul. There is only one way for me, I see, and I go that way.
+Farewell."
+
+The door closed. The Will was alone. For a few moments he stood, smiling
+scornfully. With a sudden despairing gesture he ran to the door, flung
+it open, and peered into the darkness.
+
+He could see no one; could hear no steps. His long beseeching cry was
+drowned among these solitudes. Slowly he re-closed the door; slowly
+walked across the stone flags; and with folded arms stood looking upon
+the altar, dyed crimson with the glow from the great lamp which hung
+midway in the nave.
+
+There was a choir-stall to the right. Here he sat, for a time glad
+merely to be at rest.
+
+Soon all desire of sleep went from him, and he began to dream. At this
+he smiled: it was so brief a while ago since he had said he would dream
+no more.
+
+Away now from his two lifelong comrades, and yet subtly connected with
+them, and living by and through each, he felt a new loneliness. Life
+could be very terrible. Life ... the word startled him. What life could
+there be for him if the Body perished? That was why he had cried out in
+anguish after his comrade had left, with that ominous word "farewell."
+True, now he lived, breathed, thought, as before: but this, he knew, was
+by some inexplicable miracle of personality, by which the three who had
+been one were each enabled to go forth, fulfilling, and in all ways
+ruled and abiding by, the natural law. If the Body should die, would he
+not then become as a breath in frost? If the Soul ... ah! he wondered
+what then would happen.
+
+"When I was with the Body," he muttered, "I was weary of dreams, or
+longed only for those dreams which could be fulfilled in action. But now
+... now it is different. I am alone. I must follow my own law. But what
+... how ... where ... am I to choose? All the world is a wilderness with
+a heart of living light. The side we see is Life: the side we do not see
+we call Hope. All ways--a thousand myriad ways--lead to it. Which shall
+I choose? How shall I go?"
+
+Then I began to dream ... I ... we ... then the Will began to dream.
+
+Slowly the Forest Chapel filled with a vast throng, ever growing more
+dense as it became more multitudinous, till it seemed as though the
+walls fell away and that the aisles reached interminably into the world
+of shadow, through the present into the past, and to dim ages.
+
+Behind the altar stood a living Spirit, most wonderful, clothed with
+Beauty and Terror.
+
+Then the Will saw, understood, that this was not the Christ, nor yet the
+Holy Spirit, but a Dominion. It was the Spirit of this world, one of the
+Powers and Dominions whom of old men called the gods. But all in that
+incalculable throng worshipped this Spirit as the Supreme God. He saw,
+too, or realised, that, to those who worshipped, this Spirit appeared
+differently, now as a calm and august dreamer, now as an inspired
+warrior, now as a man wearing a crown of thorns against the shadow of a
+gigantic cross: as the Son of God, or the Prophet of God, or in manifold
+ways the Supreme One, from Jehovah to the savage Fetich.
+
+Turning from that ocean of drowned life, he looked again at the
+rainbow-plumed and opal-hued Spirit: but now he could see no one,
+nothing, but a faint smoke that rose as from a torch held by an
+invisible hand. The altar stood unserved.
+
+Nor was the multitude present. The myriad had become a wavering shadow,
+and was no more.
+
+A child had entered the church. The little boy came slowly along the
+nave till he stood beneath the red lamp, so that his white robe was warm
+with its glow. He sang, and the Will thought it was a strange song to
+hear in that place, and wondered if the child were not an image of what
+was in his own heart.
+
+    When the day darkens,
+    When dusk grows light,
+    When the dew is falling,
+      When Silence dreams...
+    I hear a wind
+    Calling, calling
+    By day and by night.
+
+    What is the wind
+    That I hear calling
+    By day and by night,
+      The crying of wind?
+    When the day darkens,
+    When dusk grows light,
+    When the dew is falling?
+
+The Will rose and moved towards the child. No one was there, but he saw
+that a wind-eddy blew about the altar, for a little cloud of rose-leaves
+swirled above it. As in a dream he heard a voice, faint and sweet:--
+
+    Out of the Palace
+    Of Silence and Dreams
+    My voice is falling
+      From height to height:
+    I am the Wind
+    Calling, calling
+    By day and by night.
+
+The red flame waned and was no more. Above the altar a white flame, pure
+as an opal burning in moonfire, rose for a moment, and in a moment was
+mysteriously gathered into the darkness.
+
+Startled, the Will stood moveless in the obscurity. Were these symbols
+of the end--the red flame and the white ... the Body and the Soul?
+
+Then he remembered the ancient wisdom of the Gael, and went out of the
+Forest Chapel and passed into the woods. He put his lips to the earth,
+and lifted a green leaf to his brow, and held a branch to his ear: and
+because he was no longer heavy with the sweet clay of mortality, though
+yet of the human clan, he heard that which we do not hear, and saw that
+which we do not see, and knew that which we do not know. All the green
+life was his. In that new world he saw the lives of trees, now pale
+green, now of woodsmoke blue, now of amethyst: the grey lives of stone:
+breaths of the grass and reed: creatures of the air, delicate and wild
+as fawns, or swift and fierce and terrible, tigers of that undiscovered
+wilderness, with birds almost invisible but for their luminous wings,
+their opalescent crests.
+
+With these and the familiar natural life, with every bird and beast
+kindred and knowing him kin, he lived till the dawn, and from the dawn
+till sunrise, and from sunrise till noon. At noon he slept. When he woke
+he saw that he had wandered far, and was glad when he came to a
+woodlander's cottage. Here a woman gave him milk and bread, but she was
+dumb, and he could learn nothing from her. She showed him a way which he
+followed; and by that high upland path, before sundown, he came again
+upon the Forest Chapel, and saw that it stood on a spur of blue hills.
+
+Were it not for a great and startling weakness that had suddenly come
+upon him, he would have gone in search of his lost comrade. While he lay
+with his back against a tree, vaguely wondering what ill had come upon
+him, he heard a sound of wheels. Soon after a rough cart was driven
+rapidly towards the Forest Chapel, but when the countryman saw him he
+reined in abruptly, as though at once recognising one whom he had set
+out to seek. "Your friend is dying," he said; "come at once if you want
+to see him again. He sent me to look for you."
+
+In a moment all lassitude and pain went from the Will, and he sprang
+into the cart, asking (while his mind throbbed with a dreadful anxiety)
+many questions. But all he could learn from his taciturn companion was
+that yester eve his comrade had fallen in with a company of roystering
+and loose folk, with whom he had drunk heavily over-night and gamed and
+lived evilly; that all this day he had lain as in a stupor, till the
+afternoon, when he awoke and straightway fell into a quarrel about a
+woman, and, after fierce words and blows, had been mortally wounded
+with a knife. He was now lying, almost in the grasp of death, at the Inn
+of the Crossways.
+
+In the whirl of anxiety, dread, and a new and terrible confusion, the
+Will could not think clearly as to what he was to say or do, what was to
+be or could be done for his friend. And while he was still swayed
+helplessly, this way and that, as a herring in a net drifted to and fro
+by wind and wave, the Inn was reached.
+
+With stumbling eagerness he mounted the rough stairs, and entered a
+small room, clean, though almost sordid in its bareness, yet through its
+western window filled with the solemn light of sunset.
+
+On a white bed lay the Body, and the Will saw at a glance that his
+comrade had not long to live. The handkerchief the sufferer held on his
+breast was stained with the bright crimson of the riven lungs; his white
+face was whiter than the pillow, the more so, as a red splatch lay on
+each cheek.
+
+The dying man opened his eyes as the door opened. He smiled gladly when
+he saw who had come.
+
+"I am glad indeed of this," he whispered. "I feared I was to die alone,
+and in delirium or unconsciousness. Now I shall not be alone till the
+end. And then----"
+
+But here the Will sank upon his knees by the bedside. For a few minutes
+his tears fell upon the hand he clasped. The sobs shook in his throat.
+He had never fully realised what love he bore his comrade, his second
+self; how interwrought with him were all his joys and sorrows, his
+interests, his hopes and fears.
+
+Suddenly, with supplicating arms, he cried, "Do not die! Oh, do not die!
+Save me, save me, save me!"
+
+"How can I save you, how can I help you, dear friend?" asked the Body in
+a broken voice; "my sand is all but run out; my hour is come."
+
+"But do you not know, do you not see, that I cannot live without
+you!--that I must _die_--that if you perish so must I also pass with
+your passing breath!"
+
+"No--no--no!--for, see, we are no longer one, but three. The Soul is far
+from us now, and soon you too will be gone on your own way. It is only I
+who can go no more into the beautiful dear world. O Will, if I could, I
+would give all your knowledge and endless quest of wisdom and all your
+hopes, and all the dreams and the white faith of the Soul, for one
+little year of sweet human life--for one month even--ah, what do I say,
+for a few days even, for a day, for a few hours! It is so terrible thus
+to be stamped out. Yesterday I saw a dog leaping and barking in delight
+as it raced about a wagon, and then in a moment a foot caught and it was
+entangled, and the wagon-wheel crushed it into a lifeless mass. There
+was no dog; for that poor beast it was the same as though it had never
+been, as though the world had never been, as though nothing more was to
+be. He was a breath blown unremembering out of nothing into nothing.
+That is what death is. That is what death is, O Will!"
+
+"No, no, it is too horrible--too cruel--too unjust."
+
+"Yes, for you. But not for me. Your way is not the way of death, but of
+life. For me, I am as the beasts are, their sorry lord, but akin--oh
+yes, akin, akin. I follow the natural law in all things. And I know this
+now, dear comrade: that without you and the Soul I should have been no
+other than the brutes that know nothing save their innocent lusts and
+live and die without thought."
+
+The Will slowly rose.
+
+"It was madness for us to separate and come upon this quest," he said,
+looking longingly at the Body.
+
+"Not so, dear friend. We should have had to separate soon or late,
+whatsoever we had done. If I have feared you at times, and turned from
+you often, I have loved you well, and still more the Soul. I think you
+have both lied to me overmuch, and you mostly. But I forgive what I know
+was done in love and hope. And you, O Will, forgive me for all I have
+brought, what I now bring, upon you; forgive the many thwartings and
+dull indifference and heavy drag I have so often, oh, so often been to
+you. For now death is at hand. But I have one thing I wish to ask you."
+
+"Speak."
+
+"Before my life was broken, there was one whom I loved. Every hope,
+every dream, every joy, every sorrow that I had came from this love. It
+was her death which broke my life--not only for the piteous loss and all
+it meant to me, but because death came with tragic heedlessness--for she
+was young, and strong, and beautiful. And before she died, she said we
+should meet again. I was never, and now am far the less worthy of her;
+and yet--and yet--oh, if only that great, beautiful love were all I had
+to doubt or fear, I should have no doubt or fear! But no--no--we shall
+never meet. How can we? Before to-morrow I shall be like that crushed
+dog, and not be: just as if I had never been!"
+
+The blood rose, and sobs and tears made further words inaudible. But
+after a little the Body spoke again.
+
+"But you, O Will, you and the Soul both resemble me. We are as flowers
+of the same colour, as clay of the same mould. It may be you shall meet
+her. Tell her that my last thought was of her: take her all my dreams
+and hopes--and say--and say--say----"
+
+But here the Body sat up in the bed, ash-white, with parted lips and
+straining eyes.
+
+"What? Quick, quick, dear Body--say?----"
+
+"Say that I loved best that in her which I loved best in myself--the
+Soul. Tell her I have never wholly despaired. Ah, if only the Soul were
+here, I would not even now despair! Tell her I leave all to the
+Soul--and--and--love shall triumph----"
+
+There was a rush of blood, a gurgling cry, and the Body sank back
+lifeless. In the very moment of death the eyes lightened with a
+wonderful radiance--it was as though the evening stars suddenly came
+through the dark.
+
+The Will looked to see whence it came. The Soul stood beside him, white,
+wonderful, radiant.
+
+"I have come," he said.
+
+"For me?" said the Will, shaking as with an ague, yet in bitter irony.
+
+"Yes, for you, and for the Body too."
+
+"For the Body?--see, he is already clay. What word have you to say to
+_that_, to _me_ who likewise am already perishing?
+
+"This--do you remember what so brief a while ago we three as one
+wrote--wrote with my spirit, through your mind, and the Body's
+hand--these words: _Love is more great than we conceive, and Death is
+the keeper of unknown redemptions?_"
+
+"Yes--yes--O Soul! I remember, I remember."
+
+"It was true there: it is true here. Have I not ever told you that Love
+would save?"
+
+With that the Soul moved over to the bedside, and kissed the Body.
+
+"Farewell, fallen leaf. But the tree lives--and beyond the tree is the
+wind, the breath of the eternal."
+
+"Look," he added, "our comrade is still asleep, though now no mortal
+skill could nourish the hidden spark"; and with that he stooped and
+kissed again the silent lips and the still brow and the pulseless
+heart, and suddenly a breath, an essence, came from the body, in form
+like itself, a phantom, yet endued with a motion of life.
+
+As the faintest murmur in a shell we heard him whisper, _Life! Life!
+Life!_ Then, as a blown vapour, he was one with us. A singular change
+came upon the clay which had once been so near and dear to us: a frozen
+whiteness that had not been there before, a stillness as of ancient
+marble.
+
+The Will stood, appalled, with wild eyes. Some dreadful invisible power
+was upon him.
+
+"Lost!" he cried; and now his voice, too, was faint as a murmur in a
+shell. But the Soul smiled.
+
+Then the Will grew grey as a willow-leaf aslant in the wind; and as the
+shadow of a reed wavered in the wind; and as a reed's shadow is and is
+not, so was he suddenly no more.
+
+But, in the miracle of a moment, the Soul appeared in the triple mystery
+of substance, and mind, and spirit. In full and joyous life the Will
+stood re-born, and now we three were one again.
+
+I looked for the last time on that which had been our home. The lifeless
+thing lay, most terribly still and strange; yet with a dignity that
+came as a benediction, for this dead temple of life had yielded to a
+divine law, allied not to shadow and decay, but to the recurrent spring,
+to the eternal ebb and flow, to the infinite processional. It is we of
+the human clan only who are troubled by the vast waste and refuse of
+life. There is not any such waste, neither in the myriad spawn nor the
+myriad seed: a Spirit sows by the law we do not see, and reaps by a law
+we do not know.
+
+Then I turned and went to the western window. I saw that the Inn stood
+upon the Hills of Dream, yet, when I looked within, I knew that I was
+again in my familiar home. Once more, beyond the fuchsia bushes, the sea
+sighed, as it felt the long shore with a continuous foamless wave. In
+the little room below, the lamp was lit; for the glow fell warmly upon
+the gravel path, shell-bordered, and upon the tufted mignonette,
+sea-pinks, and feathery southernwood. The sound of hushed voices rose.
+
+And now the dawn is come, and I have written this record of what we, who
+are now indeed one, but far more truly and intimately than before, went
+out to seek. In another hour I shall go hence, a wayfarer again. I have
+a long road to travel, but am sustained by joy, and uplifted by a great
+hope. When, tired, I lay down the pen, and with it the last of mortal
+uses, it will be to face the glory of a new day. I have no fear. I shall
+not leave all I have loved, for I have that in me which binds me to this
+beautiful world, for another life at least, it may be for many lives.
+And that within me which dreamed and hoped shall now more gladly and
+wonderfully dream, and hope, and seek, and know, and see ever deeper and
+further into the mystery of beauty and truth. And that within me which
+_knew_, now _knows_. In the deepest sense there is no spiritual dream
+that is not true, no hope that shall for ever go famished, no tears that
+shall not be gathered into the brooding skies of compassion, to fall
+again in healing dews.
+
+What the Body could not, nor ever could see, and what to the Will was a
+darkness, or at best a bewildering mist, is now clear. There are
+mysteries of which I cannot write; not from any occult secret, but
+because they are so simple and inevitable, that, like the mystery of day
+and night, or the change of the seasons, or life and death, they must be
+learned by each, in his own way, in his own hour. It is not out of their
+light that I see; it is by these stars that I set forth, where else I
+should be as a shadow upon a trackless waste.
+
+But Love, I am come to realise, is the supreme deflecting force. Love
+"unloosens sins," unites failure, disintegrates the act; not by an
+inconceivable conflict with the immutable law of consequence, but by
+deflection. For the divine love follows the life, and turns and meets it
+at last, and in that meeting deflects: so that that which is mortal,
+evil, and what is of the mortal law, the act, sinks; and on the forehead
+of the divine law that which is alone inevitable survives and moves
+onward in the rhythm that is life. When we understand the mystery of
+Redemption, we shall understand what Love is. The expiatory is an
+unknown attribute in the Divine. Expiation is but the earthly
+burnt-offering of that in us that is mortal: Redemption, which is the
+spiritual absorption of the expiation due to others, and the measureless
+restitution in love of wrong humbly brought to the soul and consumed
+there--so that it issues a living force to meet and deflect--is the
+living witness in that of us which is immortal. Those who wrong us do
+indeed become our saviours. It is _their_ expiation that we make _ours_:
+they must go free of us; and when they come again and discrown us, then
+in love we shall be at one and equal. So far, words may clothe thought;
+but, beyond, the soul knows there is no expiation. Except you redeem
+yourself, there is no God. Forgiveness is the dream of little children:
+beautiful because thus far we see and know, but no farther.
+
+I see now what madness it was, as so often happened, to despise the
+body. But one mystery has become clear to me through this strange quest
+of ours--though when I say "I," or "our," I know not whether it is the
+Body or the Will or the Soul that speaks, till I remember that triune
+marriage at the deathbed, and know that while each is consciously
+each--the one with memory, the other with knowledge and hope, the third
+with wisdom and faith--we are yet one, as are the yellow and the white
+and the violet in the single flame in this candle beside me. And this
+mystery is, that the body was not built of life-warmed clay merely to be
+the house of the soul. Were it so, were the soul unwed to its mortal
+comrades, it would be no more than a moment's uplifted wave on an
+infinite sea. Without memory, without hope, it would be no more than a
+breath of the Spirit. But before the Divine Power moulded us into
+substance, we were shaped by it in form. And form is, in the spiritual
+law, what the crystal is in the chemic law.
+
+For now I see clearly that the chief end of the body is to enable the
+soul to come into intimate union with the natural law, so that it may
+fulfil the divine law of Form, and be at one with all created life and
+yet be for ever itself and individual. By itself the soul would only
+vainly aspire; it has to learn to remember, to become at one with the
+wind and the grass and with all that lives and moves; to take its life
+from the root of the body, and its green life from the mind, and its
+flower and fragrance from what it may of itself obtain, not only from
+this world, but from its own dews, its own rainbows, dawn stars and
+evening stars, and vast incalculable fans of time and death. And this I
+have learned: that there is no absolute Truth, no absolute Beauty, even
+for the Soul. It may be that in the Divine Forges we shall be so moulded
+as to have perfect vision. Meanwhile only that Truth is deepest, that
+Beauty highest which is seen, not by the Soul only, or by the Mind, or
+by the Body, but all three as one. Let each be perfect in kind and
+perfect in unity. This is the signal meaning of the mystery. It is so
+inevitable that it has its blind descent to fetich as well as its divine
+ascension. But the ignoble use does not annul the noble purport, any
+more than the blindness of many obscures the dream of one.
+
+There could be no life hereafter for the soul were it not for the body,
+and what were that life without the mind, the child of both, whom the
+ancient seers knew and named Mnemosynê? Without memory life would be a
+void breath, immortality a vacuum.
+
+Ah, the glory of the lifting light! The new day is come. Farewell.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] The Aztec word _Ehecatl_, which signifies alike the Wind (or
+Breath), Shadow, and Soul.
+
+
+
+
+IONA
+
+
+  "_There are moments when the soul takes wings: what it has to
+  remember, it remembers: what it loves, it loves still more: what it
+  longs for, to that it flies._"
+
+
+
+
+Iona
+
+
+A few places in the world are to be held holy, because of the love which
+consecrates them and the faith which enshrines them. Their names are
+themselves talismans of spiritual beauty. Of these is Iona.
+
+The Arabs speak of Mecca as a holy place before the time of the prophet,
+saying that Adam himself lies buried here: and, before Adam, that the
+Sons of Allah, who are called Angels, worshipped; and that when Allah
+Himself stood upon perfected Earth it was on this spot. And here, they
+add, when there is no man left upon earth, an angel shall gather up the
+dust of this world, and say to Allah, "There is nothing left of the
+whole earth but Mecca: and now Mecca is but the few grains of sand that
+I hold in the hollow of my palm, O Allah."
+
+In spiritual geography Iona is the Mecca of the Gael.
+
+It is but a small isle, fashioned of a little sand, a few grasses salt
+with the spray of an ever-restless wave, a few rocks that wade in
+heather and upon whose brows the sea-wind weaves the yellow lichen. But
+since the remotest days sacrosanct men have bowed here in worship. In
+this little island a lamp was lit whose flame lighted pagan Europe, from
+the Saxon in his fens to the swarthy folk who came by Greek waters to
+trade the Orient. Here Learning and Faith had their tranquil home, when
+the shadow of the sword lay upon all lands, from Syracuse by the
+Tyrrhene Sea to the rainy isles of Orcc. From age to age, lowly hearts
+have never ceased to bring their burthen here. Iona herself has given us
+for remembrance a fount of youth more wonderful than that which lies
+under her own boulders of Dûn-I. And here Hope waits.
+
+To tell the story of Iona is to go back to God, and to end in God.
+
+
+But to write of Iona, there are many ways of approach. No place that has
+a spiritual history can be revealed to those who know nothing of it by
+facts and descriptions. The approach may be through the obscure glens of
+another's mind and so out by the moonlit way, as well as by the track
+that thousands travel. I have nothing to say of Iona's acreage, or
+fisheries, or pastures: nothing of how the islanders live. These things
+are the accidental. There is small difference in simple life anywhere.
+Moreover, there are many to tell all that need be known.
+
+There is one Iona, a little island of the west. There is another Iona,
+of which I would speak. I do not say that it lies open to all. It is as
+we come that we find. If we come, bringing nothing with us, we go away
+ill-content, having seen and heard nothing of what we had vaguely
+expected to see or hear. It is another Iona than the Iona of sacred
+memories and prophecies: Iona the metropolis of dreams. None can
+understand it who does not see it through its pagan light, its Christian
+light, its singular blending of paganism and romance and spiritual
+beauty. There is, too, an Iona that is more than Gaelic, that is more
+than a place rainbow-lit with the seven desires of the world, the Iona
+that, if we will it so, is a mirror of your heart and of mine.
+
+History may be written in many ways, but I think that in days to come
+the method of spiritual history will be found more suggestive than the
+method of statistical history. The one will, in its own way, reveal
+inward life, and hidden significance, and palpable destiny: as the
+other, in the good but narrow way of convention, does with exactitude
+delineate features, narrate facts, and relate events. The true
+interpreter will as little despise the one as he will claim all for the
+other.
+
+And that is why I would speak here of Iona as befalls my pen, rather
+than as perhaps my pen should go: and choose legend and remembrance, and
+my own and other memories and associations, and knowledge of my own and
+others, and hidden meanings, and beauty and strangeness surviving in
+dreams and imaginations, rather than facts and figures, that others
+could adduce more deftly and with more will.
+
+
+In the _Félire na Naomh Nerennach_ is a strangely beautiful if fantastic
+legend of one Mochaoi, Abbot of n'-Aondruim in Uladh. With some
+companions he was at the edge of a wood, and while busy in cutting
+wattles wherewith to build a church, "he heard a bright bird singing on
+the blackthorn near him. It was more beautiful than the birds of the
+world." Mochaoi listened entranced. There was more in that voice than in
+the throat of any bird he had ever heard, so he stopped his
+wattle-cutting, and, looking at the bird, courteously asked who was
+thus delighting him. The bird at once answered, "A man of the people of
+my Lord" (that is, an angel). "Hail," said Mochaoi, "and for why that, O
+bird that is an angel?" "I am come here by command to encourage you in
+your good work, but also, because of the love in your heart, to amuse
+you for a time with my sweet singing." "I am glad of that," said the
+saint. Thereupon the bird sang a single surpassing sweet air, and then
+fixed his beak in the feathers of his wing, and slept. But Mochaoi heard
+the beauty and sweetness and infinite range of that song for three
+hundred years. Three hundred years were in that angelic song, but to
+Mochaoi it was less than an hour. For three hundred years he remained
+listening, in the spell of beauty: nor in that enchanted hour did any
+age come upon him, or any withering upon the wattles he had gathered;
+nor in the wood itself did a single leaf turn to a red or yellow flame
+before his eyes. Where the spider spun her web, she spun no more: where
+the dove leaned her grey breast from the fir, she leaned still.
+
+Then suddenly the bird took its beak from its wing-feathers, and said
+farewell. When it was gone, Mochaoi lifted his wattles, and went
+homeward as one in a dream. He stared, when he looked for the little
+wattled cells of the Sons of Patrick. A great church built of stone
+stood before his wondering eyes. A man passed him, and told the stranger
+that it was the church of St. Mochaoi. When he spoke to the assembled
+brothers, none knew him: some thought he had been taken away by the
+people of the Shee, and come back at fairy-nightfall, which is the last
+hour of the last day of three hundred years. "Tell us your name and
+lineage," they cried. "I am Mochaoi, Abbot of n'-Aondruim," he said, and
+then he told his tale, and they knew him, and made him abbot again. In
+the enchanted wood a shrine was built, and about it a church grew, "and
+surpassingly white angels often alighted there, or sang hymns to it from
+the branches of the forest trees, or leaned with their foot on tiptoe,
+their eyes on the horizon, their ear on the ground, their wings
+flapping, their bodies trembling, waiting to send tidings of prayer and
+repentance with a beat of their wings to the King of the Everlasting."
+
+There are many who thought that Mochaoi was dead, when he was seen no
+more of his fellow-monks at the forest monastery of n'Aondruim in Uladh.
+But his chronicler knew: "a sleep without decay of the body Mochaoi of
+Antrim slept."
+
+I am reminded of the story of Mochaoi when I think of Iona. I think she
+too, beautiful isle, while gathering the help of human longing and tears
+and hopes, strewn upon her beaches by wild waves of the world, stood,
+enchanted, to listen to a Song of Beauty. "That is a new voice I hear in
+the wave," we can dream of her saying, and of the answer: "we are the
+angelic flocks of the Shepherd: we are the Voices of the Eternal: listen
+a while!"
+
+It has been a long sleep, that enchanted swoon. But Mochaoi awoke, after
+three hundred years, and there was neither time upon his head, nor age
+in his body, nor a single withered leaf of the forest at his feet. And
+shall not that be possible for the Isle of Dreams, whose sands are the
+dust of martyrs and noble and beautiful lives, which was granted to one
+man by "one of the people of my Lord?"
+
+
+When I think of Iona I think often, too, of a prophecy once connected
+with Iona; though perhaps current no more in a day when prophetical
+hopes are fallen dumb and blind.
+
+It is commonly said that, if he would be heard, none should write in
+advance of his times. That I do not believe. Only, it does not matter
+how few listen. I believe that we are close upon a great and deep
+spiritual change. I believe a new redemption is even now conceived of
+the Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is itself as a woman, broken
+in dreams, and yet sustained in faith, patient, long-suffering, looking
+towards home. I believe that though the Reign of Peace may be yet a long
+way off, it is drawing near: and that Who shall save us anew shall come
+divinely as a Woman, to save as Christ saved, but not, as He did, to
+bring with Her a sword. But whether this Divine Woman, this Mary of so
+many passionate hopes and dreams, is to come through mortal birth, or as
+an immortal Breathing upon our souls, none can yet know.
+
+Sometimes I dream of the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon
+Iona, and of that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the
+Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit
+embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, as once through mortal birth
+in a Man, the coming of a new Presence and Power: and dream that this
+may be upon Iona, so that the little Gaelic island may become as the
+little Syrian Bethlehem. But more wise it is to dream, not of hallowed
+ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the soul wherein She shall appear
+white and radiant. Or, that upon the hills, where we are wandered, the
+Shepherdess shall call us home.
+
+From one man only, on Iona itself, I have heard any allusion to the
+prophecy as to the Saviour who shall yet come: and he in part was
+obscure, and confused the advent of Mary into the spiritual world with
+the possible coming again to earth of Mary, as another Redeemer, or with
+a descending of the Divine Womanhood upon the human heart as a universal
+spirit descending upon awaiting souls. But in intimate remembrance I
+recall the words and faith of one or two whom I loved well. Nor must I
+forget that my old nurse, Barabal, used to sing a strange "oran," to the
+effect that when St. Bride came again to Iona it would be to bind the
+hair and wash the feet of the Bride of Christ.
+
+One of those to whom I allude was a young Hebridean priest, who died in
+Venice, after troubled years, whose bitterest vicissitude was the
+clouding of his soul's hope by the wings of a strange multitude of
+dreams--one of whom and whose end I have elsewhere written: and he told
+me once how, "as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe,
+that Holy Spirit shall come again which once was mortally born among us
+as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine
+Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world
+will know peace." And when I asked him if it were not prophesied that
+the Woman is to be born in Iona, he said that if this prophecy had been
+made it was doubtless of an Iona that was symbolic, but that this was a
+matter of no moment, for She would rise suddenly in many hearts, and
+have her habitation among dreams and hopes. The other who spoke to me of
+this Woman who is to save was an old fisherman of a remote island of the
+Hebrides, and one to whom I owe more than to any other spiritual
+influence in my childhood, for it was he who opened to me the three
+gates of Beauty. Once this old man, Seumas Macleod, took me with him to
+a lonely haven in the rocks, and held me on his knee as we sat watching
+the sun sink and the moon climb out of the eastern wave. I saw no one,
+but abruptly he rose and put me from him, and bowed his grey head as he
+knelt before one who suddenly was standing in that place. I asked
+eagerly who it was. He told me that it was an Angel. Later, I learned (I
+remember my disappointment that the beautiful vision was not winged with
+great white wings) that the Angel was one soft flame of pure white, and
+that below the soles of his feet were curling scarlet flames. He had
+come in answer to the old man's prayer. He had come to say that we could
+not see the Divine One whom we awaited. "But you will yet see that Holy
+Beauty," said the Angel, and Seumas believed, and I too believed, and
+believe. He took my hand, and I knelt beside him, and he bade me repeat
+the words he said. And that was how I first prayed to Her who shall yet
+be the Balm of the World.
+
+And since then I have learned, and do see, that not only prophecies and
+hopes, and desires unclothed yet in word or thought, foretell her
+coming, but already a multitude of spirits are in the gardens of the
+soul, and are sowing seed and calling upon the wind of the south; and
+that everywhere are watching eyes and uplifted hands, and signs which
+cannot be mistaken, in many lands, in many peoples, in many minds; and,
+in the heaven itself that the soul sees, the surpassing signature.
+
+I recall one whom I knew, a fisherman of the little green island: and I
+tell this story of Coll here, for it is to me more than the story of a
+dreaming islander. One night, lying upon the hillock that is called
+Cnoc-nan-Aingeal, because it is here that St. Colum was wont to hold
+converse with an angel out of heaven, he watched the moonlight move like
+a slow fin through the sea: and in his heart were desires as infinite as
+the waves of the sea, the moving homes of the dead.
+
+And while he lay and dreamed, his thoughts idly adrift as a net in deep
+waters, he closed his eyes, muttering the Gaelic words of an old line,
+
+_In the Isle of Dreams God shall yet fulfil Himself anew_.
+
+Hearing a footfall, he stirred. A man stood beside him. He did not know
+the man, who was young, and had eyes dark as hill-tarns, with hair light
+and soft as thistledown; and moved light as a shadow, delicately
+treading the grass as the wind treads it. In his hair he had twined the
+fantastic leaf of the horn-poppy.
+
+The islander did not move or speak: it was as though a spell were upon
+him.
+
+"God be with you," he said at last, uttering the common salutation.
+
+"And with you, Coll mac Coll," answered the stranger. Coll looked at
+him. Who was this man, with the sea-poppy in his hair, who, unknown,
+knew him by name? He had heard of one whom he did not wish to meet, the
+Green Harper: also of a grey man of the sea whom islesmen seldom alluded
+to by name: again, there was the Amadan Dhû ... but at that name Coll
+made the sign of the cross, and remembering what Father Allan had told
+him in South Uist, muttered a holy exorcism of the Trinity.
+
+The man smiled.
+
+"You need have no fear, Coll mac Coll," he said quietly.
+
+"You that know my name so well are welcome, but if you in turn would
+tell me your name I should be glad."
+
+"I have no name that I can tell you," answered the stranger gravely;
+"but I am not of those who are unfriendly. And because you can see me
+and speak to me, I will help you to whatsoever you may wish."
+
+Coll laughed.
+
+"Neither you nor any man can do that. For now that I have neither father
+nor mother, nor brother nor sister, and my lass too is dead, I wish
+neither for sheep nor cattle, nor for new nets and a fine boat, nor a
+big house, nor as much money as MacCailein Mòr has in the bank at
+Inveraora."
+
+"What then do you wish for, Coll mac Coll?"
+
+"I do not wish for what cannot be, or I would wish to see again the dear
+face of Morag, my lass. But I wish for all the glory and wonder and
+power there is in the world, and to have it all at my feet, and to know
+everything that the Holy Father himself knows, and have kings coming to
+me as the crofters come to MacCailein Mòr's factor."
+
+"You can have that, Coll mac Coll," said the Green Harper, and he waved
+a withe of hazel he had in his hand.
+
+"What is that for?" said Coll.
+
+"It is to open a door that is in the air. And now, Coll, if that is your
+wish of all wishes, and you will give up all other wishes for that wish,
+you can have the sovereignty of the world. Ay, and more than that: you
+shall have the sun like a golden jewel in the hollow of your right hand,
+and all the stars as pearls in your left, and have the moon as a white
+shining opal above your brows, with all knowledge behind the sun, within
+the moon, and beyond the stars."
+
+Coll's face shone. He stood, waiting. Just then he heard a familiar
+sound in the dusk. The tears came into his eyes.
+
+"Give me instead," he cried, "give me a warm breast-feather from that
+grey dove of the woods that is winging home to her young." He looked as
+one moon-dazed. None stood beside him. He was alone. Was it a dream, he
+wondered? But a weight was lifted from his heart. Peace fell upon him as
+dew upon grey pastures. Slowly he walked homeward. Once, glancing back,
+he saw a white figure upon the knoll, with a face noble and beautiful.
+Was it Colum himself come again? he mused: or that white angel with whom
+the Saint was wont to discourse, and who brought him intimacies of God?
+or was it but the wave-fire of his dreaming mind, as lonely and cold and
+unreal as that which the wind of the south makes upon the wandering
+hearths of the sea?
+
+I tell this story of Coll here, for, as I have said, it is to me more
+than the story of a dreaming islander. He stands for the soul of a race.
+It is because, to me, he stands for the sorrowful genius of our race,
+that I have spoken of him here. Below all the strife of lesser desires,
+below all that he has in common with other men, he has the livelong
+unquenchable thirst for the things of the spirit. This is the thirst
+that makes him turn so often from the near securities and prosperities,
+and indeed all beside, setting his heart aflame with vain, because
+illimitable, desires. For him, the wisdom before which knowledge is a
+frosty breath: the beauty that is beyond what is beautiful. For, like
+Coll, the world itself has not enough to give him. And at the last, and
+above all, he is like Coll in this, that the sun and moon and stars
+themselves may become as trampled dust, for only a breast-feather of
+that Dove of the Eternal, which may have its birth in mortal love, but
+has its evening home where are the dews of immortality.
+
+
+"The Dove of the Eternal." It was from the lips of an old priest of the
+Hebrides that I first heard these words. I was a child, and asked him if
+it was a white dove, such as I had seen fanning the sunglow in
+Icolmkill.
+
+"Yes," he told me, "the Dove is white, and it was beloved of Colum, and
+is of you, little one, and of me."
+
+"Then it is not dead?"
+
+"It is not dead."
+
+I was in a more wild and rocky isle than Iona then, and when I went
+into a solitary place close by my home it was to a stony wilderness so
+desolate that in many moods I could not bear it. But that day, though
+there were no sheep lying beside boulders as grey and still, nor
+whinnying goats (creatures that have always seemed to me strangely
+homeless, so that, as a child, it was often my noon-fancy on hot days to
+play to them on a little reed-flute I was skilled in making, thwarting
+the hill-wind at the small holes to the fashioning of a rude furtive
+music, which I believed comforted the goats, though why I did not know,
+and probably did not try to know): and though I could hear nothing but
+the soft, swift, slipping feet of the wind among the rocks and grass and
+a noise of the tide crawling up from a shore hidden behind crags
+(beloved of swallows for the small honey-flies which fed upon the
+thyme): still, on that day, I was not ill at ease, nor in any way
+disquieted. But before me I saw a white rock-dove, and followed it
+gladly. It flew circling among the crags, and once I thought it had
+passed seaward; but it came again, and alit on a boulder.
+
+I went upon my knees, and prayed to it, and, as nearly as I can
+remember, in these words:--
+
+"O Dove of the Eternal, I want to love you, and you to love me: and if
+you live on Iona, I want you to show me, when I go there again, the
+place where Colum the Holy talked with an angel. And I want to live as
+long as you, Dove" (I remember thinking this might seem disrespectful,
+and that I added hurriedly and apologetically), "Dove of the Eternal."
+
+That evening I told Father Ivor what I had done. He did not laugh at me.
+He took me on his knee, and stroked my hair, and for a long time was so
+silent that I thought he was dreaming. He put me gently from him, and
+kneeled at the chair, and made this simple prayer which I have never
+forgotten: "O Dove of the Eternal, grant the little one's prayer."
+
+That is a long while ago now, and I have sojourned since in Iona, and
+there and elsewhere known the wild doves of thought and dream. But I
+have not, though I have longed, seen again the White Dove that Colum so
+loved. For long I thought it must have left Iona and Barra too, when
+Father Ivor died.
+
+Yet I have not forgotten that it is not dead. "I want to live as long as
+you," was my child's plea: and the words of the old priest, knowing and
+believing were, "O Dove of the Eternal, grant the little one's prayer."
+
+
+It was not in Barra, but in Iona, that, while yet a child, I set out one
+evening to find the Divine Forges. A Gaelic sermon, preached on the
+shoreside by an earnest man, who, going poor and homeless through the
+west, had tramped the long roads of Mull over against us, and there fed
+to flame a smouldering fire, had been my ministrant in these words. The
+"revivalist" had spoken of God as one who would hammer the evil out of
+the soul and weld it to good, as a blacksmith at his anvil: and
+suddenly, with a dramatic gesture, he cried: "This little island of Iona
+is this anvil; God is your blacksmith: but oh, poor people, who among
+you knows the narrow way to the Divine Forges?"
+
+There is a spot on Iona that has always had a strange enchantment for
+me. Behind the ruined walls of the Columban church, the slopes rise, and
+the one isolated hill of Iona is, there, a steep and sudden wilderness.
+It is commonly called Dûn-I (_Doon-ee_), for at the summit in old days
+was an island fortress; but the Gaelic name of the whole of this
+uplifted shoulder of the isle is Slibh Meanach. Hidden under a wave of
+heath and boulder, near the broken rocks, is a little pool. From
+generation to generation this has been known, and frequented, as the
+Fountain of Youth.
+
+There, through boggy pastures, where the huge-horned shaggy cattle
+stared at me, and up through the ling and roitch, I climbed: for, if
+anywhere, I thought that from there I might see the Divine Forges, or at
+least might discover a hidden way, because of the power of that water,
+touched on the eyelids at sunlift, at sunset, or at the rising of the
+moon.
+
+From where I stood I could see the people still gathered upon the dunes
+by the shore, and the tall, ungainly figure of the preacher. In the
+narrow strait were two boats, one being rowed across to Fionnaphort, and
+the other, with a dun sail burning flame-brown, hanging like a bird's
+wing against Glas Eilean, on the tideway to the promontory of Earraid.
+Was the preacher still talking of the Divine Forges? I wondered; or were
+the men and women in the ferry hurrying across to the Ross of Mull to
+look for them among the inland hills? And the Earraid men in the
+fishing-smack: were they sailing to see if they lay hidden in the
+wilderness of rocks, where the muffled barking of the seals made the
+loneliness more wild and remote?
+
+I wetted my eyelids, as I had so often done before (and not always
+vainly, though whether vision came from the water, or from a more
+quenchless spring within, I know not), and looked into the little pool.
+Alas! I could see nothing but the reflection of a star, too obscured by
+light as yet for me to see in the sky, and, for a moment, the shadow of
+a gull's wing as the bird flew by far overhead. I was too young then to
+be content with the symbols of coincidence, or I might have thought that
+the shadow of a wing from Heaven, and the light of a star out of the
+East, were enough indication. But, as it was, I turned, and walked idly
+northward, down the rough side of Dun Bhuirg (at Cul Bhuirg, a furlong
+westward, I had once seen a phantom, which I believed to be that of the
+Culdee, Oran, and so never went that way again after sundown) to a
+thyme-covered mound that had for me a most singular fascination.
+
+It is a place to this day called Dûn Mananain. Here, a friend who told
+me many things, a Gaelic farmer named Macarthur, had related once a
+fantastic legend about a god of the sea. Manaun was his name, and he
+lived in the times when Iona was part of the kingdom of the Suderöer.
+Whenever he willed he was like the sea, and that is not wonderful, for
+he was born of the sea. Thus his body was made of a green wave. His hair
+was of wrack and tangle, glistening with spray; his robe was of windy
+foam; his feet, of white sand. That is, when he was with his own, or
+when he willed; otherwise, he was as men are. He loved a woman of the
+south so beautiful that she was named Dèar-sadh-na-Ghréne (Sunshine). He
+captured her and brought her to Iona in September, when it is the month
+of peace. For one month she was happy: when the wet gales from the west
+set in, she pined for her own land: yet in the dream-days of November,
+she smiled so often that Manaun hoped; but when Winter was come, her
+lover saw that she could not live. So he changed her into a seal. "You
+shall be a sleeping woman by day," he said, "and sleep in my dûn here on
+Iona: and by night, when the dews fall, you shall be a seal, and shall
+hear me calling to you from a wave, and shall come out and meet me."
+
+They have mortal offspring also, it is said.
+
+There is a story of a man who went to the mainland, but could not see to
+plough, because the brown fallows became waves that splashed noisily
+about him. The same man went to Canada, and got work in a great
+warehouse; but among the bales of merchandise he heard the singular note
+of the sandpiper, and every hour the sea-fowl confused him with their
+crying.
+
+Probably some thought was in my mind that there, by Dûn Mananain, I
+might find a hidden way. That summer I had been thrilled to the inmost
+life by coming suddenly, by moonlight, on a seal moving across the last
+sand-dune between this place and the bay called Port Ban. A strange
+voice, too, I heard upon the sea. True, I saw no white arms upthrown, as
+the seal plunged into the long wave that swept the shore; and it was a
+grey skua that wailed above me, winging inland; yet had I not had a
+vision of the miracle?
+
+But alas! that evening there was not even a barking seal. Some sheep fed
+upon the green slope of Manaun's mound.
+
+
+So, still seeking a way to the Divine Forges, I skirted the shore and
+crossed the sandy plain of the Machar, and mounted the upland district
+known as Sliav Starr (the Hill of Noises), and walked to a place, to me
+sacred. This was a deserted green airidh between great rocks. From here
+I could look across the extreme western part of Iona, to where it
+shelved precipitously around the little Port-na-Churaich, the Haven of
+the Coracle, the spot where St. Columba landed when he came to the
+island.
+
+I knew every foot of ground here, as every cave along the wave-worn
+shore. How often I had wandered in these solitudes, to see the great
+spout of water rise through the grass from the caverns beneath, forced
+upward when tide and wind harried the sea-flocks from the north; or to
+look across the ocean to the cliffs of Antrim, from the Carn cul Ri
+Eirinn, the Cairn of the Hermit King of Ireland, about whom I had woven
+many a romance.
+
+I was tired, and fell asleep. Perhaps the Druid of a neighbouring mound,
+or the lonely Irish King, or Colum himself (whose own Mound of the
+Outlook was near), or one of his angels who ministered to him, watched,
+and shepherded my dreams to the desired fold. At least I dreamed, and
+thus:--
+
+The skies to the west beyond the seas were not built of flushed clouds,
+but of transparent flame. These flames rose in solemn stillness above a
+vast forge, whose anvil was the shining breast of the sea. Three great
+Spirits stood by it, and one lifted a soul out of the deep shadow that
+was below; and one with his hands forged the soul of its dross and
+welded it anew; and the third breathed upon it, so that it was winged
+and beautiful. Suddenly the glory-cloud waned, and I saw the multitude
+of the stars. Each star was the gate of a long, shining road. Many--a
+countless number--travelled these roads. Far off I saw white walls,
+built of the pale gold and ivory of sunrise. There again I saw the three
+Spirits, standing and waiting. So these, I thought, were not the walls
+of Heaven, but the Divine Forges.
+
+That was my dream. When I awaked, the curlews were crying under the
+stars.
+
+When I reached the shadowy glebe, behind the manse by the sea, I saw the
+preacher walking there by himself, and doubtless praying. I told him I
+had seen the Divine Forges, and twice; and in crude, childish words told
+how I had seen them.
+
+"It is not a dream," he said.
+
+I know now what he meant.
+
+
+It would seem to be difficult for most of us to believe that what has
+perished can be reborn. It is the same whether we look upon the dust of
+ancient cities, broken peoples, nations that stand and wait, old
+faiths, defeated dreams. It is so hard to believe that what has fallen
+may arise. Yet we have perpetual symbols; the tree, that the winds of
+Autumn ravage and the Spring restores; the trodden weed, that in April
+awakes white and fragrant; the swallow, that in the south remembers the
+north. We forget the ebbing wave that from the sea-depths comes again:
+the Day, shod with sunrise while his head is crowned with stars.
+
+Far-seeing was the vision of the old Gael, who prophesied that Iona
+would never wholly cease to be "the lamp of faith," but would in the end
+shine forth as gloriously as of yore, and that, after dark days, a new
+hope would go hence into the world. But before that (and he prophesied
+when the island was in its greatness)--
+
+    "Man tig so gu crich
+    Bithidh I mar a bha,
+    Gun a ghuth mannaich
+    Findh shalchar ba ..."
+
+quaint old-world Erse words, which mean--
+
+    "Before this happens,
+    Iona will be as it was,
+    Without the voice of a monk,
+    Under the dung of cows."[2]
+
+And truly enough the little island was for long given over to the
+sea-wind, whose mournful chant even now fills the ruins where once the
+monks sang matins and evensong; for generations, sheep and long-horned
+shaggy kine found their silent pastures in the wilderness that of old
+was "this our little seabounded Garden of Eden."
+
+But now that Iona has been "as it was," the other and greater change may
+yet be, may well have already come.
+
+Strange, that to this day none knows with surety the derivation or
+original significance of the name Iona. Many ingenious guesses have been
+made, but of these some are obviously far-fetched, others are impossible
+in Gaelic, and all but impossible to the mind of any Gael speaking his
+ancient tongue. Nearly all these guesses concern the Iona of Columba:
+few attempt the name of the sacred island of the Druids. Another people
+once lived here with a forgotten faith; possibly before the Picts there
+was yet another, who worshipped at strange altars and bowed down before
+Shadow and Fear, the earliest of the gods.
+
+The most improbable derivation is one that finds much acceptance. When
+Columba and his few followers were sailing northward from the isle of
+Oronsay, in quest, it is said, of this sacred island of the Druids,
+suddenly one of the monks cried _sud i_ (_? siod e!_) "yonder it!" With
+sudden exultation Columba exclaimed, _Mar sud bithe I, goir thear II_,
+"Be it so, and let it be called I" (I or EE). We are not the wiser for
+this obviously monkish invention. It accounts for a syllable only, and
+seems like an effort to explain the use of _I_ (II, Y, Hy, Hee) for
+"island" in place of the vernacular Innis, Inch, Eilean, etc. Except in
+connection with Iona I doubt if _I_ for island is ever now used in
+modern Gaelic. Icolmkill is familiar: the anglicised Gaelic of the Isle
+of Colum of the Church. But it is doubtful if any now living has ever
+heard a Gael speak of an island as _I_; I doubt if an instance could be
+adduced. On the other hand, _I_ might well have been, and doubtless is,
+used in written speech as a sign for Innis, as _'s_ is the common
+writing of _agus_, and. As for the ancient word _Idh_ or _Iy_ I do not
+know that its derivation has been ascertained, though certain Gaelic
+linguists claim that _Idh_ and Innis are of the same root.
+
+I do not know on what authority, but an anonymous Gaelic writer, in an
+account of Iona in 1771, alludes to the probability that Christianity
+was introduced there before St. Columba's advent, and that the island
+was already dedicated to the Apostle St. John, "for it was originally
+called _I'Eoin_, i.e. the Isle of John, whence Iona." _I'eoin_ certainly
+is very close in sound, as a Gael would pronounce it, to Iona, and there
+can be little doubt that the island had druids (whether Christian monks
+also with or without) when Columba landed. Before Conall, King of Alba
+(as he was called, though only Dalriadic King of Argyll), invited Colum
+to Iona, to make that island his home and sanctuary, there were
+certainly Christian monks on the island. Among them was the
+half-mythical Odran or Oran, who is chronicled in the _Annals of the
+Four Masters_ as having been a missionary priest, and as having died in
+Iona fifteen years before Colum landed. Equally certainly there were
+druids at this late date, though discredited of the Pictish king and his
+people, for a Cymric priest of the old faith was at that time Ard-Druid.
+This man Gwendollen, through his bard or second-druid Myrddin (Merlin),
+deplored the persecution to which he was subject, in that now he and his
+no longer dared to practise the sacred druidical rites "in raised
+circles"--adding bitterly, "the grey stones themselves, even, they have
+removed."
+
+Again, Davies in his _Celtic Researches_ speaks of Colum as having on
+his settlement in Iona burnt a heap of druidical books. It is at any
+rate certain that druidical believers (helots perhaps) remained to
+Colum's time, even if the last druidic priest had left. In the explicit
+accounts which survive there is no word of any dispossession of the
+druidic priests. It is more than likely that the Pictish king, who had
+been converted to Christianity, and gave the island to Columba by
+special grant, had either already seen Irish monks inhabit it, or at
+least had withdrawn the lingering priests of the ancient faith of his
+people. Neither Columba nor Adamnan nor any other early chronicler
+speaks of Iona as held by the Druids when the little coracle with the
+cross came into Port-na-Churaich.
+
+Others have derived the name from _Aon_, an isthmus, but the objections
+to this are that it is not applicable to the island, and perhaps never
+was; and, again, the Gaelic pronunciation. Some have thought that the
+word, when given as _I-Eoin_, was intended, not for the Isle of John,
+but the Isle of Birds. Here, again, the objection is that there is no
+reason why Iona should be called by a designation equally applicable to
+every one of the numberless isles of the west. To the mountaineers of
+Mull, however, the little low-lying seaward isle must have appeared the
+haunt of the myriad sea-fowl of the Moyle; and if the name thus derives,
+doubtless a Mull man gave it.
+
+Again, it is said that Iona is a miswriting of _Ioua_, "the avowed
+ancient name of the island." It is easy to see how the scribes who
+copied older manuscripts might have made the mistake; and easy to
+understand how, the mistake once become the habit, fanciful
+interpretations were adduced to explain "Iona."
+
+There is little reasonable doubt that _Ioua_ was the ancient Gaelic or
+Pictish name of the island. I have frequently seen allusions to its
+having been called Innis nan Dhruidnechean, or Dhruidhnean, the Isle of
+the Druids: but that is not ancient Gaelic, and I do not think there is
+any record of Iona being so called in any of the early manuscripts.
+Doubtless it was a name given by the Shenachies or bardic story-tellers
+of a later date, though of course it is quite possible that Iona was of
+old commonly called the Isle of the Druids. In this connection I may put
+on record that a few years ago I heard an old man of the western part of
+the Long Island (Lewis), speak of the priests and ministers of to-day as
+"druids"; and once, in either Coll or Tiree, I heard a man say, in
+English, alluding to the Established minister, "Yes, yes, that will be
+the way of it, for sure, for Mr. ---- is a wise druid." It might well
+be, therefore, that in modern use the Isle of Druids signified only the
+Isle of Priests. There is a little island of the Outer Hebrides called
+Innis Chailleachan Dhubh--the isle of the black old women; and a legend
+has grown up that witches once dwelt here and brewed storms and evil
+spells. But the name is not an ancient name, and was given not so long
+ago, because of a small sisterhood of black-cowled nuns who settled
+there.
+
+St. Adamnan, ninth Abbot of Iona, writing at the end of the seventh
+century, invariably calls the island _Ioua_ or the _Iouan Island_.
+Unless the hypothesis of the careless scribes be accepted, this should
+be conclusive.
+
+For myself I do not believe that there has been any slip of _n_ for _u_.
+And I am confirmed in this opinion by the following circumstance. Three
+years ago I was sailing on one of the sea-lochs of Argyll. My only
+companion was the boatman, and incidentally I happened to speak of some
+skerries (a group of sea-set rocks) off the Ross of Mull, similarly
+named to rocks in the narrow kyle we were then passing; and learned with
+surprise that my companion knew them well, and was not only an Iona man,
+but had lived on the island till he was twenty. I asked him about his
+people, and when he found that I knew them he became more confidential.
+But he professed a strange ignorance of all concerning Iona. There was
+an old Iona iorram, or boat-song, I was anxious to have: he had never
+heard of it. Still more did I desire some rendering or even some lines
+of an ancient chant of whose existence I knew, but had never heard
+recited, even fragmentarily. He did not know of it: he "did not know
+Gaelic," that is, he remembered only a little of it. Well, no, he
+added, perhaps he did remember some, "but only just to talk to fishermen
+an' the like."
+
+Suddenly a squall came down out of the hills. The loch blackened. In a
+moment a froth of angry foam drove in upon us, but the boat righted, and
+we flew before the blast, as though an arrow shot by the wind. I noticed
+a startling change in my companion. His blue eyes were wide and
+luminous; his lips twitched; his hands trembled. Suddenly he stooped
+slightly, laughed, cried some words I did not catch, and abruptly broke
+into a fierce and strange sea-chant. It was no other than the old Iona
+rann I had so vainly sought!
+
+Some memory had awakened in the man, perhaps in part from what I had
+said--with the old spell of the sea, the old cry of the wind.
+
+Then he ceased abruptly, he relapsed, and with a sheepish exclamation
+and awkward movement shrank beside me. Alas, I could recall only a few
+lines; and I failed in every effort to persuade him to repeat the rann.
+But I had heard enough to excite me, for again and again he had called
+or alluded to Iona by its ancient pre-Columban name of Ioua, and once at
+least I was sure, from the words, that the chant was also to Ioua the
+Moon.
+
+That night, however, he promised to tell me on the morrow all he could
+remember of the old Ioua chant. On the morrow, alas, he had to leave
+upon an unexpected business that could not be postponed, and before his
+return, three days later, I was gone. I have not seen him again, but it
+is to him I am indebted for the loan of an ancient manuscript map of
+Iona, a copy of which I made and have by me still. It was an heirloom:
+by his own account had been in his family, in Iona, for seven
+generations, "an it's Himself knows how much more." He had been to the
+island the summer before, because of his father's death, and had brought
+this coarsely painted and rudely framed map away with him. He told me
+too, that night, how the oldest folk on the island--"some three or four
+o' them, anyway; them as has the Gaelic"--had the old Ioua chant in
+their minds. As a boy he had heard it at many a winter _ceilidh_. "Ay,
+ay, for sure, Iona was called Ioua in them old ancient days."
+
+My friend also had a little book of his mother's which contained, in a
+neat hand, copies of Gaelic songs, among them some of the old Islay and
+Skye oar-chants of the _iorram_ kind. I recall an iorram that had
+hardly a word in it, but was only a series of barbaric cries, sometimes
+full of lament (_hò-ro-aroo-aròne_, _ho-ro_, _ah-hòne_, _ah-hòne_!),
+which was the Iona fisherman's song to entice seals to come near. I
+remember, too, the opening of a "maighdean-mhara" or mermaid song, by a
+little-known namesake of my own, a sister of Mary Macleod, "the sweet
+singer of the Hebrides," because it had as a heading (perhaps put there
+by the Iona scribe) some lines of Mary's that I liked well.
+
+I quote from memory, but these were to the effect that, in his home,
+what the Macleod loved, was playing at chess
+
+    _Agus fuaim air a chlarsaich
+    Gus e h'eachdraidh na dheigh sin
+    Greis air ursgeul na Fèine_
+
+[_and the music of the harp, and the telling of tales of the feats of
+the Féinn_ (the Fingalians).] There are not many now, I fear, who could
+find entertainment thus, or care to sit before the peat-fires.
+
+On one other occasion I have heard the name Ioua used by a fisherman. I
+was at Strachnr, on Loch Fyne, and was speaking to the skipper of a
+boat's crew of Macleods from the Lews, when I was attracted by an old
+man. He knew my Uist friend, then at Strachur, who told me more than one
+strange legend of the Sliochd-nan-Ron, the seal-men. I met the old man
+that night before the peat-glow, and while he was narrating a story of a
+Princess of Spain who married the King of Ireland's son, he spoke
+incidentally of their being wrecked on Iona, "that was then called Ioua,
+ay, an' that for one hundred and two hundred and three hundred years and
+thrice a hundred on the top o' that before it was Icolmkill."
+
+I did not know him, but a friend told me that the late Mr. Cameron, the
+minister of Brodick, in Arran, had the M.S. of an old Iona (or
+Hebridean) iorram, in the refrain of which _Ioua_ was used throughout.
+
+Neither do I think the name the island now bears has anything in common
+with _Ioua_. In a word, I am sure that the derivations of Iona are
+commonly fanciful, and that the word is simply Gaelic for the Isle of
+Saints, and was so given it because of Columba and the abbots and monks
+who succeeded him and his. In Gaelic, the letters _sh_ at the beginning
+of a word are invariably mute; so that _I-shona_, the Isle of Saints,
+would be pronounced _Iona_. I think that any lingering doubt I had
+about the meaning of the name went when I got the old map of which I
+have spoken, and found that in the left corner was written in large rude
+letters _II-SHONA_.
+
+
+How great a man was the Irish monk Crimthan, called Colum, the Dove:
+Columcille, the Dove of the Church. One may read all that has been
+written of him since the sixth century, and not reach the depths of his
+nature. I doubt if any other than a Gael can understand him aright. More
+than any Celt of whom history tells, he is the epitome of the Celt. In
+war, Cuchullin himself was not more brave and resourceful. Finn, calling
+his champions to the pursuit of Grania, or Oìsin boasting of the Fianna
+before Patrick, was not more arrogant, yet his tenderness could be as
+his Master's was, and he could be as gentle as a young mother with her
+child, and had a child's simplicity. He knew the continual restlessness
+of his race. He was forty-two when he settled in Iona, and had led a
+life of frequent and severe vicissitude, often a wanderer, sometimes
+with blood against him and upon his head, once in extremity of danger,
+an outlaw, excommunicated. But even in his haven of Iona he was not
+content. He journeyed northward through the Pictish realms, a more
+dangerous and obscure adventure then than to cross Africa to-day. He
+sailed to "the Ethican island" as St. Adamnan calls Tiree, and made of
+it a sanctuary, where prayer might rise as a continual smoke from quiet
+homes. No fear of the savage clans of Skye--where a woman had once
+reigned with so great a fame in war that even the foremost champion of
+Ireland went to her in his youth to learn arms and
+battle-wisdom--restrained him from facing the island Picts. Long before
+Hakon the Dane fought the great seafight off Largs on the mainland,
+Colum had built a church there. In the far Perthshire wilds, before
+Macbeth slew Duncan the king, the strong abbot of Iona had founded a
+monastery in that thanedom. At remote Inbhir Nis, the Inverness of
+to-day, he overcame the King of the Picts and his sullen Druids, by his
+daring, the fierce magnetism of his will, his dauntless resource. Once,
+in a savage region, far north-eastward, towards the Scandinavian sea, he
+was told that there his Cross would not long protect either wattled
+church or monk's cell: on that spot he built the monastery of Deir, that
+stood for a thousand years, and whose priceless manuscript is now one of
+the treasures of Northumbria.
+
+Columba was at once a saint, a warrior, a soldier of Christ, a great
+abbot, a dauntless explorer, and militant Prince of the Church; and a
+student, a man of great learning, a poet, an artist, a visionary, an
+architect, administrator, law-maker, judge, arbiter. As a youth this
+prince, for he was of royal blood, was so beautiful that he was likened
+to an angel. In mature manhood, there was none to equal him in stature,
+manly beauty, strength, and with a voice so deep and powerful that it
+was like a bell and could be heard on occasion a mile away, and once,
+indeed, at the court of King Bruidh, literally overbore and drowned a
+concerted chorus of sullen druids. These had tried to outvoice him and
+his monks, little knowing what a mighty force the sixty-fourth Psalm
+could be in the throat of this terrible Culdee, who to them must have
+seemed much more befitting his house-name, Crimthan (Wolf), than "the
+Dove"!
+
+This vocal duel was a characteristic device of the Druids. I recall one
+notable instance long before Colum's time, though the _Leabhar na
+H'Uidhre_ in which it is to be found was not compiled till A.D. 1000. In
+the story of the love of Connla, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, for
+a woman of the other world, a druid asks her whence she has come, and
+when she answers that it is from the lands of those who live a beautiful
+and deathless life, he knows that she is a woman of the _Sidhe_. So he
+chants against the fair woman till the spell of her voice is overcome,
+and she goes away as a mist that falls on the shore, as a Hebridean poet
+would say.[3]
+
+Later, she comes again, and now invisible to all save Connla. Conn the
+king hears her chanting to Connla that it is no such lofty place he
+holds "amid short-lived mortals awaiting fearful death" that he need
+dread to leave it, "the more as the ever-living ones invite thee to be
+the ruler over Tethra (a Kingdom of Joy)." So once more the king calls
+upon the Ard-Druid to dispel the woman by his incantations. For a moment
+Connla wavers, but the Fairy Woman, with a music of mockery, sings to
+him that Druidism is in ill-favour "over yonder," little loved and
+little honoured "there," for, in effect, the nations of the Shee do not
+need that idle dream. Connla's longing is more great to him than his
+kingdom or the fires of home, and he goes with his leannanshee in a
+boat, till those on the strand see him dimly and then no more in that
+sundown glow, nor ever again. Columba, a poet and scholar familiar with
+the old tables of his beloved Eiré, probably did not forget on occasion
+to turn this druidic tale against Druidism itself, repeating how, in its
+own time, before the little bell of the tonsured folk was heard in
+Ireland (so little a bell to be the tocsin of fallen gods and broken
+nations), "Druidism is not loved, for little has it progressed to honour
+on the great Righteous Strand."
+
+
+For one thing of great Gaelic import, Columba has been given a singular
+pre-ëminence--not for his love of country, pride of race, passionate
+loyalty to his clan, to every blood-claim and foster-claim, and
+friendship-claim, though in all this he was the very archetype of the
+clannish Gael--but because (so it is averred) he was the first of our
+race of whom is recorded the systematic use of the strange gift of
+spiritual foresight, "second-sight." It has been stated authoritatively
+that he is the first of whom there is record as having possessed this
+faculty; but that could only be averred by one ignorant of ancient
+Gaelic literature. Even in Adamnan's chronicle, within some seventy
+years after the death of Columba, there is record of others having this
+faculty, apart from the perhaps more purely spiritual vision of his
+mother Aithnê, when an angel raimented her with the beauty of her unborn
+son, or of his foster-father, the priest Cruithnechan, who saw the
+singular light of the soul about his sleeping pupil, or of the abbot
+Brendan who redeemed the saint from excommunication and perhaps death by
+his vision of him advancing with a pillar of fire before him and an
+angel on either side. (When, long years afterwards, Brendan died in
+Ireland, Colum in Iona startled his monks by calling for an immediate
+celebration of the Eucharist, because it had been revealed to him that
+St. Brendan had gone to the heavenly fatherland yesternight: "Angels
+came to meet his soul: I saw the whole earth illumined with their
+glory.") Among others there is the story of Abbot Kenneth, who, sitting
+at supper, rose so suddenly as to leave without his sandals, and at the
+altar of his church prayed for Colum, at that moment in dire peril upon
+the sea: the story of Ernan, who, fishing in the river Fenda, saw the
+death of Colum in a symbol of flame: the story of Lugh mac Tailchan,
+who, at Cloinfinchoil, beheld Iona (which he had never visited), and
+above it a blaze of angels' wings, and Colum's soul. In the most ancient
+tales there is frequent allusion to what we call second-sight. The
+writers alluded to could not have heard of the warning of the dread
+Mor-Rigân to Cuchullin before the fatal strife of the Táin-Bó-Cuailgne;
+or Cuchullin's own pre-vision (among a score as striking) of the
+hostings and gatherings on the fatal plain of Muirthemne; or the
+Amazonian queen, Scathach's, fore-knowledge of the career and early
+death of the champion of the Gaels:
+
+    "(At the last) great peril awaits thee ...
+    Alone against a vast herd:
+    Thirty years I reckon the length of thy years
+      (literally, the strength of thy valour);
+    Further than this I do not add;"
+
+or of Deirdre's second-sight, when by the white cairn on Sliav Fuad she
+saw the sons of Usna headless, and Illann the Fair headless too, but
+Buimne the Ruthless Red with his head upon his shoulders, smiling a grim
+smile--when she saw over Naois, her beloved, a cloud of blood--or that,
+alas, too bitter-true a foreseeing, when in the Craebh Derg, the House
+of the Red Branch, she cried to her lover and his two brothers that
+death was at the door and "grievous to me is the deed O darling
+friends--and till the world's end Emain will not be better for a single
+night than it is to-night." Or, again, of that pathetic, simultaneous
+death-vision of Bailê the Sweet-Spoken and Aillinn, he in the north, she
+in the south, so that each out of a grief unbearable straightway died,
+as told in one of the oldest as well as loveliest of ancient Gaelic
+tales, the _Scél Baili Binnbérlaig_.
+
+There is something strangely beautiful in most of these "second-sight"
+stories of Columba. The faculty itself is so apt to the spiritual law
+that one wonders why it is so set apart in doubt. It would, I think, be
+far stranger if there were no such faculty.
+
+That I believe, it were needless to say, were it not that these words
+may be read by many to whom this quickened inward vision is a
+superstition, or a fantastic glorification of insight. I believe; not
+only because there is nothing too strange for the soul, whose vision
+surely I will not deny, while I accept what is lesser, the mind's
+prescience, and, what is least, the testimony of the eyes. That I have
+cause to believe is perhaps too personal a statement, and is of little
+account; but in that interior wisdom, which is no longer the flicker of
+one little green leaf but the light and sound of a forest, of which the
+leaf is a part, I know that to be true, which I should as soon doubt as
+that the tide returns or that the sap rises or that dawn is a ceaseless
+flashing light beneath the circuit of the stars. Spiritual logic demands
+it.
+
+It would ill become me to do otherwise. I would as little, however, deny
+that this inward vision is sometimes imperfect and untrustworthy, as I
+would assert that it is infallible. There is no common face of good or
+evil; and in like fashion the aspect of this so-called mystery is
+variable as the lives of those in whom it dwells. With some it is a
+prescience, more akin to instinct than to reason, and obtains only among
+the lesser possibilities, as when one beholds another where in the body
+none is; or a scene not possible, there, in that place; or a face, a
+meeting of shadows, a disclosure of hazard or accident, a coming into
+view of happenings not yet fulfilled. With some it is simply a larger
+sight, more wide, more deep; not habitual, because there is none of us
+who is not subject to the law of the body; and sudden, because all tense
+vision is a passion of the moment. It is as the lightning, whose
+sustenance is sure for all that it has a second's life. With a few it is
+a more constant companion, a dweller by the morning thought, by the
+noon reverie, by the evening dream. It lies upon the pillow for some:
+to some it as though the wind disclosed pathways of the air; a swaying
+branch, a dazzle on the wave, the quick recognition in unfamiliar eyes,
+is, for others, sufficient signal. Not that these accidents of the
+manner need concern us much. We have the faculty, or we do not have it.
+Nor must we forget that it can be the portion of the ignoble as well as
+of those whose souls are clear. When it is in truth a spiritual vision,
+then we are in company of what is the essential life, that which we call
+divine.
+
+It was this that Columba had, this serene perspicuity. That it was a
+conscious possession we know from his own words, for he gave this answer
+to one who marvelled: "Heaven has granted to some to see on occasion in
+their mind, clearly and surely, the whole of earth and sea and sky."
+
+It is not unlikely that in the seventy years which elapsed between
+Colum's death and the writing of that lovely classic of the Church,
+Adamnan's _Vita St. Columbæ_, some stories grew around the saint's
+memory which were rather the tribute of childlike reverence and love
+than the actual experiences of the holy man himself. What then? A field
+in May is not the less a daughter of Spring, because the
+cowslip-wreaths found there may have been brought from little wayward
+garths by children who wove them lovingly as they came.
+
+Many of these strange records are mere coincidences; others reveal so
+happy a surety in the simple faith of the teller that we need only
+smile, and with no more resentment than at a child who runs to say he
+has found stars in a wayside pool. Others are rather the keen insight of
+a ceaseless observation than the seeing of an inward sense. But, and
+perhaps oftener, they are not inherently incredible. I do not think our
+forebears did ill to give haven to these little ones of faith, rather
+than to despise, or to drive them away.
+
+I have already spoken of Columba as another St. Francis, because of his
+tenderness for creatures. I recall now the lovely legend (for I do not
+think Colum himself attributed "second-sight" to an animal) which tells
+how the old white pony which daily brought the milk from the cow-shed to
+the monastery came and put its head in the lap of the aged and feeble
+abbot, thus mutely to bid farewell. Let Adamnan tell it: "This creature
+then coming up to the saint, and knowing that his master would soon
+depart from him, and that he would see his face no more, began to utter
+plaintive moans, and, as if a man, to shed tears in abundance into the
+saint's lap, and so to weep, frothing greatly. Which when the attendant
+saw, he began to drive away that weeping mourner. But the saint forbade
+him, saying, 'Let him alone? As he loves me so, let him alone, that into
+this my bosom he may pour out the tears of his most bitter lamentation.
+Behold, thou, a man, that hast a soul, yet in no way hast knowledge of
+my end save what I have myself shown thee; but to this brute animal the
+Master Himself hath revealed that his master is about to go away from
+him.' And so saying, he blessed his sorrowing servant the horse."
+
+If there be any to whom the aged Colum comforting the grief of his old
+white pony is a matter of disdain or derision, I would not have his soul
+in exchange for the dumb sorrow of that creature. One would fare further
+with that sorrow, though soulless, than with the soul that could not
+understand that sorrow.
+
+If one were to quote from Adamnan's three Books of the Prophecies,
+Miracles, and Visions of Columba, there would be another book. Amid much
+that is childlike, and a little that is childish, what store of
+spiritual beauty and living symbol in these three books--the Book of
+Prophetic Revelations, the Book of Miracles of Power, the Book of
+Angelic Visitations. But there, as elsewhere, one must bear in
+remembrance that, in spiritual sight, there is symbolic vision as well
+as actual vision. When Colum saw his friend Columbanus (who, unknown to
+any on Iona, had set out in his frail coracle from the Isle of Rathlin)
+tossed in the surges of Corryvrechan; or when, nigh Glen Urquhart, he
+hurried forward to minister to an old dying Pict "who had lived well by
+the light of nature," and whose house, condition, and end had been
+suddenly revealed to him: then we have actual vision. When Aithnê, his
+mother, dreamed that an angel showed her a garment of so surpassing a
+loveliness that it was as though woven of flowers and rainbows, and then
+threw it on high, till its folds expanded and covered every mountain-top
+from the brows of Connaught to the feet of the Danish sea, and so
+revealed to her what manner of son she bore within her womb; or when, in
+the hour of Colum's death, the aged son of Tailchan beheld the whole
+expanse of air flooded with the blaze of angels' wings, which trembled
+with their songs: then we have symbolic vision. And sometimes we have
+that which partakes of each, as when (as Adamnan tells us in his third
+book) Colum saw angels standing upon the rocks on the opposite side of
+the Sound which divides Iona from the Ross of Mull, calling to his soul
+to cross to them, yet, as they assembled and beckoned, mysteriously and
+suddenly restrained, for his hour was not come.
+
+And in all actual vision there is gradation; from what is so common,
+premonition, to what is not common, prescience, and to what is rare,
+revelation. Thus when the labourers on Iona looked up from the fields
+and saw the aged abbot whom they so loved, borne in a wagon to give them
+benediction at seed-sowing, many among them knew that they would not see
+Colum again, and Colum knew it, and so shared that premonition. And
+when, many years before, he and the abbot Comgell, returning from a
+futile conference of the kings Aedh and Aidan, rested by a spring,
+concerning which Colum said that the day would come when it would be
+filled with human blood, "because my people, the Hy-Neill, and the
+Pictish folk, thy relations according to the flesh, will wage war by
+this fortress of Cethirn close by," Comgell learned, through Colum's
+foreknowledge, of what did in truth come to pass. Again, when Colum
+bade a brother go three days thence to the sea-shore on the west side of
+Iona, and lie in readiness to help "a certain guest, a crane to wit,
+beaten by the winds during long and circuitous and aerial flights, which
+will arrive after the ninth hour of the day, very weary and sore
+distressed," and bade him to lift it and tend it lovingly for three days
+and three nights till it should have strength to return to "its former
+sweet home," and to do this out of love and courtesy because "it comes
+from our fatherland"--and when all happens and is done as the saint
+foretold and commanded, then we have revelation, the vision that is
+absolute, the knowledge that is the atmosphere of the inevitable. It
+would take a book indeed to tell all the stories of Columba's visionary
+and prophetic powers. That I write at this length concerning him,
+indeed, is because he is himself Iona. Columba is Christian Iona, as
+much as Iona is Icolmkill. I have often wondered (because of a passage
+in Adamnan) if the island be not indeed named after him, the Dove: for
+as Adamnan says incidentally, the name Columba is identical with the
+Hebrew name Jonah, also signifying a Dove, and by the Hebrews pronounced
+Iona.
+
+It is enough now to recall that this man, so often erring but so human
+always, in whose life we see the soul of Iona as in a glass, is become
+the archetype of his race, as Iona is the microcosm of the Gaelic world.
+That he came into this life heralded by dreams and visions, that from
+his youth onward to old age he knew every mystery of dream and vision,
+and that before and after his death his soul was revealed to others
+through dreams and visions, is but an added hieratic grace: yet we do
+well to recall often how these dreams before and these visions after
+were angelical, and nobly beautiful: how there was left of him, and to
+his little company, and to us for remembrance, that last signal vision
+of a blaze of angelic wings, more intolerable than the sun at noon, the
+tempestuous multitude trembling with the storm of song.
+
+
+Columba and Oran ... these are the two great names in Iona. Love and
+Faith have made one immortal; the other lives also, clothed in legend. I
+am afraid there is not much definite basis for the popular Iona legend
+of Oran. It is now the wont of guides and others to speak of the Réilig
+Odhrain, Oran's burial-place, as that of Columba's friend (and victim),
+but it seems likelier that the Oran who lies here is he who is spoken
+of in the _Annals of the Four Masters_ as having died in the year 548,
+that is fifteen years before Colum came to the island. This, however,
+might well be a mistake: what is more convincing is that Adamnan never
+mentions the episode, nor even the name of Oran, nor is there mention of
+him in that book of Colum's intimate friend and successor, Baithene,
+which Adamnan practically incorporated. On the other hand, the Oran
+legend is certainly very old. The best modern rendering we have of it is
+that of Mr. Whitley Stokes in his _Three Middle-Irish Homilies_, and
+readers of Dr. Skene's valuable _Celtic Scotland_ recollect the
+translation there redacted. The episode occurs first in an ancient Irish
+life of St. Columba. The legend, which has crystallised into a popular
+saying, "Uir, ùir, air sùil Odhrain! mu'n labhair e tuille
+comhraidh"--"Earth, earth on Oran's eyes, lest he further blab"--avers
+that three days after the monk Oran or Odran was entombed alive (some
+say in the earth, some in a cavity), Colum opened the grave, to look
+once more on the face of the dead brother, when to the amazed fear of
+the monks and the bitter anger of the abbot himself, Oran opened his
+eyes and exclaimed, "There is no such great wonder in death, nor is Hell
+what it has been described." (Ifrinn, or Ifurin--the word used--is the
+Gaelic Hell, the Land of Eternal Cold.) At this, Colum straightway cried
+the now famous Gaelic words, and then covered up poor Oran again lest he
+should blab further of that uncertain world whither he was supposed to
+have gone. In the version given by Mr. Whitley Stokes there is no
+mention of Odran's grave having been uncovered after his entombment. But
+what is strangely suggestive is that both in the oral legend and in that
+early monkish chronicle alluded to, Columba is represented as either
+suggesting or accepting immolation of a living victim as a sacrifice to
+consecrate the church he intended to build.
+
+One story is that he received a divine intimation to the effect that a
+monk of his company must be buried alive, and that Odran offered
+himself. In the earliest known rendering "Colum Cille said to his
+people: 'It is well for us that our roots should go underground here';
+and he said to them, 'It is permitted to you that some one of you go
+under the earth of this island to consecrate it.' Odran rose up readily,
+and thus he said: 'If thou wouldst accept me,' he said, 'I am ready for
+that.' ... Odran then went to heaven. Colum Cille then founded the
+Church of Hii."
+
+It would be a dark stain on Columba if this legend were true. But apart
+from the fact that Adamnan does not speak of it or of Oran, the
+probabilities are against its truth. On the other hand, it is, perhaps,
+quite as improbable that there was no basis for the legend. I imagine
+the likelier basis to be that a druid suffered death in this fashion
+under that earlier Odran of whom there is mention in the _Annals of the
+Four Masters_: possibly, that Odran himself was the martyr, and the
+Ard-Druid the person who had "the divine intimation." Again, before it
+be attributed to Columba, one would have to find if there is record of
+such an act having been performed among the Irish of that day. We have
+no record of it. It is not improbable that the whole legend is a
+symbolical survival, an ancient teaching of some elementary mystery
+through some real or apparent sacrificial rite.
+
+Among the people of Iona to-day there is a very confused idea about St.
+Oran. To some he is a saint: to others an evil-doer: some think he was a
+martyr, some that he was punished for a lapse from virtue. Some swear by
+his grave, as though it were almost as sacred as the Black Stone of
+Iona: to others, perhaps most, his is now but an idle name.
+
+By the Black Stone of Iona! One may hear that in Icolmkill or anywhere
+in the west. It used to be the most binding oath in the Highlands, and
+even now is held as an indisputable warrant of truth. In Iona itself,
+strangely enough, one would be much more likely to hear a statement
+affirmed "by St. Martin's Cross." On this stone--the old Druidic Stone
+of Destiny, sacred among the Gael before Christ was born--Columba
+crowned Aidan King of Argyll. Later, the stone was taken to
+Dunstaffnage, where the Lords of the Isles were made princes: thence to
+Scone, where the last of the Celtic Kings of Scotland was crowned on it.
+It now lies in Westminster Abbey, a part of the Coronation Chair, and
+since Edward I. every British monarch has been crowned upon it. If ever
+the Stone of Destiny be moved again, that writing on the wall will be
+the signature of a falling dynasty; but perhaps, like Iona in the island
+saying, this can be left to the Gaelic equivalent of Nevermas, "gus am
+bi MacCailein na' rìgh," "till Argyll be a king."
+
+
+In my childhood I well recall meeting in Iona an old man who had come
+from the glens of Antrim, to me memorable because he was the last
+Gaelic minstrel of the old kind I have seen. "It was a poor land,
+Antrim," he said, "with no Gaelic, a bitter lot o' protestantry, an'
+little music."
+
+I remember, too, his adding in effect:
+
+"It is in the west you should be if you want music, an' men and women
+without coldness or the hard mouth. In Donegal an' Mayo an' all down
+Connemara-way to the cliffs of Moher you'll hear the wind an' the voices
+o' the Shee with never a man to curse the one or the other." I asked him
+why he had come to Iona. It was to see the isle of Colum, he said, "St.
+Bridget's brother, God bless the pair av' thim." He was on his way to
+Oban, thence to go to a far place in the Athole country, where his
+daughter had married a factor who had returned to his own land from the
+Irish west, and was the more dear to the old man because his only living
+blood-kin, and because she had called her little girl by the name of the
+old harper's long-lost love, "my love an' my wife."
+
+The last harper, though he had not his harp with him. He had come from
+Drogheda in a cattle-boat to Islay (whence he had sailed in a
+fishing-smack to Iona), and his friend the mate had promised to leave
+the harp and his other belongings at Oban in safe keeping. He had with
+him, however, a small instrument that he called his little clar. It was
+something between a guitar and a cithern, suggestive of a primitive
+violin, and he played on it sometimes with his fingers, sometimes with a
+short bit of wood like a child's tipcat; and, he said, could make good
+music with a hazel-wand or "the dry straight rod of a quicken when
+that's to be had." He said this quaint instrument had come down to him
+through fifty-one generations: literally, "eleven and twice twenty
+_sheanairean_ (grandfathers, or elders or forebears)," of whom he could
+at any moment give the pedigree of _ceithir deug air 'fhichead_, "four
+and ten upon twenty"--that is, to translate the Gaelic method of
+enumeration, "thirty-four."
+
+This was at the house of a minister then lodging in the island, and it
+was he who hosted the old harper. He told me, later, that he had no
+doubt this was the old-world cruit, the Welsh _crwth_ of to-day, and the
+once colloquial Lowland "crowther," akin to the Roman _canora cythara_,
+the "forebear" of the modern Spanish guitar. To this day, I may add,
+Highlanders (at least in the west) call the guitar the
+_Cruit-Spànteach_. There seems to have been four kinds of "harp" in the
+old days: the clar or clarsach, the kairneen (ceirnine), the
+kreemtheencrooth (cream-thine-cruit), and the cionar cruit. The clarsach
+was the harp proper; that is, the small Celtic harp. The ceirnine was
+the smaller hand-harp. The "creamthine cruit" had six strings, and was
+probably used chiefly at festivals, possibly for a strong sonance to
+accentuate chants; while the cionar cruit had ten strings, and was
+played either by a bow or with a wooden or other instrument. It must
+have been a cionar-cruit, ancient or a rude later-day imitation, that
+the old harper had.
+
+Poor old man, I fear he never played on his harp again; for I learned
+later that he had found his Athole haven broken up, and his daughter and
+her husband about to emigrate to Canada, so that he went with them, and
+died on the way--perhaps as much from the mountain-longing and
+home-sickness as from any more tangible ill.
+
+I have a double memento of him that I value. In Islay he had bought or
+been given a little book of Gaelic songs (the Scoto-Gaelic must have
+puzzled him sorely, poor old _eirionnach_), and this he left behind him,
+and my minister friend gave it to me, with much of the above noted down
+on its end-pages. The little book had been printed early in the century,
+and was called _Ceilleirean Binn nan Creagan Aosda_, literally
+"Melodious Little Warblings from the Aged Rocks"; and it has always been
+dear to me because of one lovely phrase in it about birds, where the
+unknown Gaelic singer calls them "clann bheag' nam preas," the small
+clan of the bushes, equivalent in English to "the children of the
+bushes." This occurs in a lovely verse--
+
+    "Mu'n cuairt do bhruachaibh ard mo glinn,
+    Biodh luba gheuga 's orra blath,
+    's clann bheag' nam preas a' tabhairst seinn
+    Do chreagaibh aosd oran graidh."
+
+("Along the lofty sides of my glen let there be bending boughs clad in
+blossom, and the children of the bushes making the aged rocks re-echo
+their songs of love")--truly a characteristic Gaelic wish,
+characteristically expressed.
+
+And though this that I am about to say did not happen on Iona, I may
+tell it here, for it was there and from an islander I heard it, an old
+man herding among the troubled rocky pastures of Sguir Mòr and Cnoc na
+Fhiona, in the south of that western part called Sliav Starr--one
+translation of which might be Wuthering Heights, for the word can be
+rendered wind-blustery or wind-noisy; though I fancy that _starr_ is, on
+Iona, commonly taken to mean a strong coarse grass. (Fhiona here I take
+to be not the genitive of a name, nor that of "wine," but a mis-spelling
+of _fionna_, grain.)
+
+When he was a boy he was in the island of Barra, he said, and he had a
+foster-brother called Iain Macneil. Iain was born with music in his
+mind, for though he was ever a poor creature as a man, having as a child
+eaten of the bird's heart, he could hear a power o' wonder in the
+wind.[4] He had never come to any good in a worldly sense, my old
+herdsman Micheil said; but it was not from want of cleverness only, but
+because "he had enough with his music." "Poor man, he failed in
+everything he did but that--and, sure, that was not against him, for _is
+ann air an tràghadh a rugadh e_--wasn't he born when the tide was
+ebbing?" Besides, there was a mystery. Iain's father was said to be an
+Iona man, but that was only a politeness and a play upon words ("_The
+Holy Isle of the Western Sea_" could mean either Iona or the mystic
+Hy-Bràsil, or Tir-na-thonn of the underworld); for he had no mortal
+father, but a man of the Smiling Distant People was his father. Iain's
+mother had loved her Leannan-shee, her fairy sweetheart, but that love
+is too strong for a woman to bear, and she died. Before Iain was born
+she lay under a bush of whitethorn, and her Leannan appeared to her. "I
+can't give you life," he said, "unless you'll come away with me." But
+she would not; for she wished the child to have Christian baptism.
+"Well, good-bye," he said, "but you are a weak love. A woman should care
+more for her lover than her child. But I'll do this: I'll give the child
+the dew, an' he won't die, an' we'll take him away when we want him. An'
+for a gift to him, you can have either beauty or music." "I don't want
+the dew," she said, "for I'd rather he lay below the grass beside me
+when his time comes: an' as for beauty, it's been my sorrow. But because
+I love the songs you have sung to me an' wooed me with, an' made me
+forget to hide my soul from you--an' it fallen as helpless as a broken
+wave on damp sand--let the child have the _binn-beul_ an' the _làmh
+clarsaireachd_ (the melodious mouth an' the harping hand)."
+
+And truly enough Iain Macneil "went away." He went back to his own
+people. It must have been a grief to him not to lie under the grass
+beside his mother, but it was not for his helping. For days before he
+mysteriously disappeared he went about making a _ciucharan_ like a
+November wind, a singular plaintive moaning. When asked by his
+foster-brother Micheil why he was not content, he answered only "_Far am
+bi mo ghaol, bidh mo thathaich_" (Where my Love is, there must my
+returning be). He had for days, said Micheil, the mournful crying in the
+ear that is so often a presage of death or sorrow; and himself had said
+once "Tha 'n éabh a' m' chenais"--the cry is in my ear. When he went
+away, that going was the way of the snow.
+
+
+It is no wonder that legends of Finn and Oisein, of Oscur and Gaul and
+Diarmid, of Cuchullin, and many of the old stories of the Gaelic
+chivalry survive in the isles. There, more than in Ireland, Gaelic has
+survived as the living speech, and though now in the Inner Hebrides it
+is dying before "an a' Beurla," the English tongue, and still more
+before the degraded "Bheurla leathan" or Glasgow-English of the lowland
+west, the old vernacular still holds an ancient treasure.
+
+The last time I sailed to Staffa from Ulva, a dead calm set in, and we
+took a man from Gometra to help with an oar--his recommendation being
+that he was "cho làidir ri Cuchullin," as strong as Coohoolin. But
+neither in Iona nor in the northward isles nor in Skye itself, have I
+found or heard of much concerning the great Gaelic hero. Fionn and Oisìn
+and Diarmid are the names oftenest heard, both in legend and proverbial
+allusion. An habitual mistake is made by writers who speak of the famous
+Cuchullin or Cuthullin mountains in Skye as having been named after
+Cuchullin; and though sometimes the local guides to summer tourists may
+speak of the Gaelic hero in connection with the mountains north of
+Coruisk, that is only because of hearsay. The Gaelic name should never
+be rendered as the Cuthullin or Cohoolin mountains, but as the Coolins.
+The most obvious meaning of the name _Cuilfhion_ (Kyoolyun or Coolun),
+is "the fine corner," but, as has been suggested, the hills may have got
+their name because of the "cuillionn mara" or sea-holly, which is
+pronounced _Ku' l'-unn_ or _coolin_. This is most probably the origin
+of the name.
+
+In fine weather one may see from Iona the Coolins standing out in lovely
+blue against the northern sky-line, their contours the most beautiful
+feature in a view of surpassing beauty. How often I have watched them,
+have often dreamed of what they have seen, since Oisìn passed that way
+with Malvina: since Cuchullin learned the feats of war at Dûn Scaaiah,
+from that great queen whose name, it is said, the island bears in
+remembrance of her; since Connlaoch, his son, set sail to meet so tragic
+a death in Ireland. There are two women of Gaelic antiquity who above
+all others have always held my imagination as with a spell: Scathach or
+Sgathàith (_sky-ah_), the sombre Amazonian queen of the mountain-island
+(then perhaps, as now, known also as the Isle of Mist), and Meave, the
+great queen of Connaught, whose name has its mountain bases in gigantic
+wars, and its summits among the wild poetry and romance of the Shee.
+
+My earliest knowledge of the heroic cycle of Celtic mythology and
+history came to me, as a child, when I spent my first summer in Iona.
+How well I remember a fantastic legend I was told: how that these far
+blue mountains, so freaked into a savage beauty, were due to the
+sword-play of Cuchullin. And this happened because the Queen o' Skye had
+put a spear through the two breasts of his love, so that he went in
+among her warrior women and slew every one, and severed the head of
+Sgàyah herself, and threw it into Coruisk, where to this day it floats
+as Eilean Dubh, the dark isle. Thereafter, Cuchullin hewed the
+mountain-tops into great clefts, and trampled the hills into a craggy
+wilderness, and then rushed into the waves and fought with the
+sea-hordes till far away the bewildered and terrified stallions of the
+ocean dashed upon the rocks of Man and uttermost shores of Erin.
+
+This magnificent mountain range can be seen better still from Lunga near
+Iona, whence it is a short sail with a southerly wind. In Lunga there is
+a hill called Cnoc Cruit or Dun Cruit, and thence one may see, as in a
+vast illuminated missal whose pages are of deep blue with bindings of
+azure and pale gold, innumerable green isles and peaks and hills of the
+hue of the wild plum. When last I was there it was a day of cloudless
+June. There was not a sound but the hum of the wild bee foraging in the
+long garths of white clover, and the continual sighing of a wave.
+Listening, I thought I heard a harper playing in the hollow of the hill.
+It may have been the bees heavy with the wine of honey, but I was
+content with my fancy and fell asleep, and dreamed that a harper came
+out of the hill, at first so small that he seemed like the green stalk
+of a lily and had hands like daisies, and then go great that I saw his
+breath darkening the waves far out on the Hebrid sea. He played, till I
+saw the stars fall in a ceaseless, dazzling rain upon Iona. A wind blew
+that rain away, and out of the wave that had been Iona I saw thousands
+upon thousands of white doves rise from the foam and fly down the four
+great highways of the wind. When I woke, there was no one near. Iona lay
+like an emerald under the wild-plum bloom of the Mull mountains. The
+bees stumbled through the clover; a heron stood silver-grey upon the
+grey-blue stone; the continual wave was, as before, as one wave, and
+with the same hushed sighing.
+
+
+Two or three years ago I heard a boatman using a singular phrase, to the
+effect that a certain deed was as kindly a thought as that of the piper
+who played to St. Micheil in his grave. I had never heard of this
+before, or anything like it, nor have I since, on lip or in book. He
+told me that he spoke of a wandering piper known as Piobaire Raonull
+Dall, Blind Piper Ronald, who fifty years or so ago used to wander
+through the isles and West Highlands; and how he never failed to play a
+spring on his pipes, either to please or to console, or maybe to air a
+lament for what's lost now and can't come again, when on any holy day he
+stood before a figure of the Virgin (as he might well do in Barra or
+South Uist), or by old tombs or habitations of saints. My friend's
+father or one of his people, once, in the Kyles of Bute, when sailing
+past the little ruinous graveyard of Kilmichael on the Bute shore, had
+come upon Raonull-Dall, pacing slowly before the broken stones and the
+little cell which legend says is both the hermitage and the grave of St.
+Micheil. When asked what he was playing and what for, in that lonely
+spot, he said it was an old ancient pibroch, the Gathering of the
+Clerics, which he was playing just to cheer the heart of the good man
+down below. When told that St. Micheil would be having his fill of good
+music where he was, the old man came away in the boat, and for long sat
+silent and strangely disheartened. I have more than once since then
+sailed to that little lonely ancient grave of Kilmichael in the Kyles of
+Bute, from Tignabruaich or further Cantyre, and have wished that I too
+could play a spring upon the pipes, for if so I would play to the kind
+heart of "Piobaire Raonull Dall."
+
+Of all the saints of the west, from St. Molios or Molossius (Maol-Iosa?
+the servant by Jesus?) who has left his name in the chief township in
+Arran, to St. Barr, who has given his to the largest of the Bishop's
+Isles, as the great Barra island-chain in the South Hebrides used to be
+called, there is none so commonly remembered and so frequently invoked
+as St. Micheil. There used to be no festival in the Western Isles so
+popular as that held on 29th September, "La' Fheill Mhicheil," the Day
+of the Festival of Michael; and the Eve of Michael's Day is still in a
+few places one of the gayest nights in the year, though no longer is
+every barn turned into a dancing place or a place of merry-making or, at
+least, a place for lovers to meet and give betrothal gifts. The day
+itself, in the Catholic Isles, was begun with a special Mass, and from
+hour to hour was filled with traditional duties and pleasures.
+
+The whole of the St. Micheil ceremonies were of a remote origin, and
+some, as the ancient and almost inexplicable dances, and their archaic
+accompaniment of word and gesture far older than the sacrificial slaying
+of the Michaelmas Lamb. It is, however, not improbable that this latter
+rite was a survival of a pagan custom long anterior to the substitution
+of the Christian for the Druidic faith.
+
+The "Iollach Mhicheil"--the triumphal song of Michael--is quite as much
+pagan as Christian. We have here, indeed, one of the most interesting
+and convincing instances of the transmutation of a personal symbol. St.
+Michael is on the surface a saint of extraordinary powers and the patron
+of the shores and the shore-folk: deeper, he is an angel, who is upon
+the sea what the angelical saint, St. George, is upon the land: deeper,
+he is a blending of the Roman Neptune and the Greek Poseidon: deeper, he
+is himself an ancient Celtic god: deeper, he is no other than Manannan,
+the god of ocean and all waters, in the Gaelic Pantheon: as, once more,
+Manannan himself is dimly revealed to us as still more ancient, more
+primitive, and even as supreme in remote godhead, the Father of an
+immortal Clan.
+
+To this day Micheil is sometimes alluded to as the god Micheil, and I
+have seen some very strange Gaelic lines which run in effect:--
+
+    "It was well thou hadst the horse of the god Micheil
+    Who goes without a bit in his mouth,
+    So that thou couldst ride him through the fields of the air,
+    And with him leap over the knowledge of Nature"--
+
+presumably not very ancient as they stand, because of the use of "steud"
+for horse, and "naduir" for nature, obvious adaptations from English and
+Latin. Certainly St. Michael has left his name in many places, from the
+shores of the Hebrides to the famous Mont St. Michel of Brittany, and I
+doubt not that everywhere an earlier folk, at the same places, called
+him Manannan. In a most unlikely place to find a record of old hymns and
+folk-songs, one of the volumes of Reports of the Highlands and Islands
+Commission, Mr. Carmichael many years ago contributed some of his
+unequalled store of Hebridean reminiscence and knowledge. Among these
+old things saved, there is none that is better worth saving than the
+beautiful Catholic hymn or invocation sung at the time of the midsummer
+migration to the hill-pastures. In this shealing-hymn the three powers
+who are invoked are St. Micheil (for he is a patron saint of horses and
+travel, as well as of the sea and seafarers), St. Columba, guardian of
+Cattle, and the Virgin Mary, "Mathair Uain ghil," "Mother of the White
+Lamb," as the tender Gaelic has it, who is so beautifully called the
+golden-haired Virgin Shepherdess.
+
+It is pleasant to think of Columba, who loved animals, and whose care
+for his shepherd-people was always so great, as having become the patron
+saint of cattle. It is thus that the gods are shaped out of a little
+mortal clay, the great desire of the heart, and immortal dreams.
+
+I may give the whole hymn in English, as rendered by Mr. Carmichael:
+
+    I
+
+    "Thou gentle Michael of the white steed,
+    Who subdued the Dragon of blood,
+    For love of God and the Son of Mary,
+    Spread over us thy wing, shield us all!
+    Spread over us thy wing, shield us all!
+
+    II
+
+    "Mary beloved! Mother of the White Lamb,
+    Protect us, thou Virgin of nobleness,
+    Queen of beauty! Shepherdess of the flocks!
+    Keep our cattle, surround us together,
+    Keep our cattle, surround us together.
+
+    III
+
+    "Thou Columba, the friendly, the kind,
+    In name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
+    Through the Three-in-One, through the Three,
+    Encompass us, guard our procession,
+    Encompass us, guard our procession.
+
+    IV
+
+    "Thou Father! Thou Son! Thou Holy Spirit!
+    Be the Three-One with us day and night,
+    On the machair plain, on the mountain ridge,
+    The Three-one is with us, with His arm around our head,
+    The Three-One is with us, with his arm around our head."
+
+I have heard a paraphrase of this hymn, both in Gaelic and English, on
+Iona; and once, off Soa, a little island to the south of Icolmkill, took
+down a verse which I thought was local, but which I afterwards found
+(with very slight variance) in Mr. Carmichael's Governmental
+Uist-Record. It was sung by Barra fishermen, and ran in effect "O
+Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! O Holy Trinity, be with us day and night.
+On the crested wave as on the mountain-side! Our Mother, Holy Mary
+Mother, has her arm under our head; our pillow is the arm of Mary, Mary
+the Holy Mother."
+
+It is perhaps the saddest commentary that could be made on what we have
+lost that the children of those who were wont to go to rest, or upon any
+adventure, or to stand in the shadow of death, with some such words as
+
+    "My soul is with the Light on the mountains,
+    Archangel Micheil shield my soul!"
+
+now go or stand in a scornful or heedless silence, or without
+remembrance, as others did who forgot to trim their lamps.
+
+Who now would go up to the hill-pastures singing the Beannachadh
+Buachailleag, the Herding Blessing? With the passing of the old language
+the old solemnity goes, and the old beauty, and the old patient, loving
+wonder. I do not like to think of what songs are likely to replace the
+Herding Blessing, whose first verse runs thus:
+
+    "I place this flock before me
+    As ordained by the King of the World,
+    Mary Virgin to keep them, to wait them, to watch them.
+      On hill and glen and plain,
+      On hill, in glen, on plain."
+
+In the maelstrom of the cities the old race perishes, drowns. How common
+the foolish utterance of narrow lives, that all these old ways of
+thought are superstitious. To have a superstition is, for these, a
+worse ill than to have a shrunken soul. I do not believe in spells and
+charms and foolish incantations, but I think that ancient wisdom out of
+the simple and primitive heart of an older time is not an ill heritage;
+and if to believe in the power of the spirit is to be superstitious, I
+am well content to be of the company that is now forsaken.
+
+But even in what may more fairly be called superstitious, have we surety
+that we have done well in our exchange?
+
+A short while ago I was on the hillside above one of the much-frequented
+lochs in eastern Argyll. Something brought to my mind, as I went farther
+up into the clean solitudes, one of the verses of the Herding Blessing:
+
+    "From rocks, from snow-wreaths, from streams,
+    From crooked ways, from destructive pits,
+    From the arrows of the slim fairy women,
+      From the heart of envy, the eye of evil,
+        Keep us, Holy St. Bride."
+
+"From the arrows of the slim fairy women." And I--do I believe in that?
+At least it will be admitted that it is worth a belief; it is a pleasant
+dream; it is a gate into a lovely world; it is a secret garden, where
+are old sweet echoes; it has the rainbow-light of poetry. Is it not
+poetry? And I--oh yes, I believe it, that superstition: a thousand-fold
+more real is it, more believable, than that coarse-tongued,
+ill-mannered, boorish people, desperate in slovenly pleasure. For that
+will stay, and they will go. And if I am wrong, then I will rather go
+with it than stay with them. And yet--surely, surely the day will come
+when this sordidness of life as it is so often revealed to us will sink
+into deep waters, and the stream become purified, and again by its banks
+be seen the slim fairy women of health and beauty and all noble and
+dignified things.
+
+This is a far cry from Iona! And I had meant to write only of how I
+heard so recently as three or four summers ago a verse of the Uist
+Herding Chant. It was recited to me, over against Dûn-I, by a friend who
+is a crofter in that part of Iona. It was not quite as Mr. Carmichael
+translates it, but near enough. The Rann Buachhailleag is, I should add,
+addressed to the cattle.
+
+    "The protection of God and Columba
+    Encompass your going and coming,
+    And about you be the milkmaid of the smooth white palms,
+    Briget of the clustering hair, golden brown."
+
+On Iona, however, there is, so far as I remember, no special spot sacred
+to St. Micheil: but there is a legend that on the night Columba died
+Micheil came over the waves on a rippling flood of light, which was a
+cloud of angelic wings, and that he sang a hymn to the soul of the saint
+before it took flight for its heavenly fatherland. No one heard that
+hymn save Colum, but I think that he who first spoke of it remembered a
+more ancient legend of how Manannan came to Cuchullin when he was in the
+country of the Shee, when Liban laughed.
+
+
+I spoke of Port-na-Churaich, the Haven of the Coracle, a little ago. How
+strange a history is that of Iona since the coming of the Irish priest,
+Crimthan, or Crimmon as we call the name, surnamed Colum Cille, the Dove
+of the Church. Perhaps its unwritten history is not less strange. God
+was revered on Iona by priests of a forgotten faith before the Cross was
+raised. The sun-priest and the moon-worshipper had their revelation
+here. I do not think their offerings were despised. Colum, who loved the
+Trinity so well that on one occasion he subsisted for three days on the
+mystery of the mere word, did not forego the luxury of human sacrifice,
+though he abhorred the blood-stained altar. For, to him, an obstinate
+pagan slain was to the glory of God. The moon-worshipper did no worse
+when he led the chosen victim to the dolmen. But the moon-worshipper was
+a Pict without the marvel of the written word; so he remained a heathen,
+and the Christian named himself saint or martyr.
+
+None knows with surety who dwelled on this mysterious island before the
+famous son of Feilim of Clan Domnhuil, great-grandson of Niall of the
+Nine Hostages, came with his fellow-monks and raised the Cross among the
+wondering Picts. But the furthest record tells of worship. Legend itself
+is more ancient here than elsewhere. Once a woman was worshipped. Some
+say she was the moon, but this was before the dim day of the
+moon-worshippers. (In Gaelic too, as with all the Celtic peoples, it is
+not the moon but the sun that is feminine.) She may have been an
+ancestral Brighde, or that mysterious Anait whose Scythian name survives
+elsewhere in the Gaelic west, and nothing else of all her ancient glory
+but that shadowy word. Perhaps, here, the Celts remembered one whom they
+had heard of in Asian valleys or by the waters of Nilus, and called upon
+Isis under a new name.
+
+The Haven of the Coracle! It was not Colum and his white-robe company
+who first made the isle sacred. I have heard that when Mary Macleod (our
+best-loved Hebridean poet) was asked what she thought of Iona, she
+replied that she thought it was the one bit of Eden that had not been
+destroyed, and that it was none other than the central isle in the
+Garden untouched of Eve or Adam, where the angels waited.
+
+Many others have dreamed by that lonely cairn of the Irish king, before
+Colum, and, doubtless, many since the child who sought the Divine
+forges.
+
+
+Years afterwards I wrote, in the same place, after an absence wherein
+Iona had become as a dream to me, the story of St. Briget, in the
+Hebrides called Bride, under the love-name commonly given her, Muime
+Chriosd--Christ's Foster-Mother. May I quote again, here, as so apposite
+to what I have written, to what indirectly I am trying to convey of the
+spiritual history of Iona, some portion of it?
+
+In my legendary story I tell of how one called Dùghall, of a kingly
+line, sailing from Ireland, came to be cast upon the ocean-shore of
+Iona, then called Innis-nan-Dhruidhneach, the Isle of the Druids--for
+this was before the cry of the Sacred Wolf was heard, as an old-time
+island-poet has it, playing upon Colum's house-name, Crimthan,
+signifying a wolf. The frail coracle in which he and others had crossed
+the Moyle had been driven before a tempest, and cast at sunrise like a
+spent fish upon the rocks of the little haven that is now called
+Port-na-Churaich. All had found death in the wave except himself and the
+little girl-child he had brought with him from Ireland, the child of so
+much tragic mystery.
+
+When, warmed by the sun, they rose, they found themselves in a waste
+place. Dùghall was ill in his mind because of the portents, and now to
+his fear and amaze the child Briget knelt on the stones, and, with
+claspt hands, frail and pink as the sea-shells round about her, sang a
+song of words which were unknown to him. This was the more marvellous,
+as she was yet but an infant, and could say few words even of Erse, the
+only tongue she had heard.
+
+At this portent, he knew that Aodh the Arch-Druid had spoken seeingly.
+Truly this child was not of human parentage. So he, too, kneeled; and,
+bowing before her, asked if she were of the race of the Tuatha de
+Danann, or of the older gods, and what her will was, that he might be
+her servant. Then it was that the kneeling child looked at him, and sang
+in a low sweet voice in Erse:
+
+    "I am but a little child,
+    Dùghall, son of Hugh, son of Art,
+    But my garment shall be laid
+    On the lord of the world,
+    Yea, surely it shall be that He,
+    The King of Elements Himself,
+    Shall lean against my bosom,
+    And I will give him peace,
+    And peace will I give to all who ask
+    Because of this mighty Prince,
+    And because of his Mother that is the Daughter of Peace."
+
+And while Dùghall Donn was still marvelling at this thing, the
+Arch-Druid of Iona approached, with his white-robed priests. A grave
+welcome was given to the stranger. While the youngest of the servants of
+God was entrusted with the child, the Arch-Druid took Dùghall aside and
+questioned him. It was not till the third day that the old man gave his
+decision. Dùghall Don was to abide on Iona if he so willed; but the
+child was to stay. His life would be spared, nor would he be a bondager
+of any kind, and a little land to till would be given him, and all that
+he might need. But of his past he was to say no word. His name was to
+become as nought, and he was to be known simply as Dùvach. The child,
+too, was to be named Bride, for that was the way the name Briget is
+called in the Erse of the Isles.
+
+To the question of Dùghall, that was thenceforth Dùvach, as to why he
+laid so great stress on the child, who was a girl, and the reputed
+offspring of shame at that, Cathal the Arch-Druid replied thus: "My
+kinsman Aodh of the golden hair, who sent you here, was wiser than Hugh
+the king, and all the Druids of Aoimag. Truly, this child is an
+Immortal. There is an ancient prophecy concerning her: surely of her who
+is now here, and no other. There shall be, it says, a spotless maid born
+of a virgin of the ancient divine race in Innisfail. And when for the
+seventh time the sacred year has come, she will hold Eternity in her lap
+as a white flower. Her maiden breasts shall swell with milk for the
+Prince of the World. She shall give suck to the King of the Elements. So
+I say unto you, Dùvach, go in peace. Take unto yourself a wife, and live
+upon the place I will allot on the east side of Ioua. Treat Bride as
+though she were your soul, and leave her much alone, and let her learn
+of the sun and the wind. In the fulness of time the prophecy shall be
+fulfilled."
+
+So was it, from that day of the days. Dùvach took a wife unto himself,
+who weaned the little Bride, who grew in beauty and grace, so that all
+men marvelled. Year by year for seven years the wife of Dùvach bore him
+a son, and these grew apace in strength, so that by the beginning of the
+third year of the seventh circle of Bride's life there were three
+stalwart youths to brother her, and three comely and strong lads, and
+one young boy fair to see. Nor did any one, not even Bride herself,
+saving Cathal the Arch-Druid, know that Dùvach the herdsman was Dùghall
+Donn, of a princely race in Innisfail.
+
+In the end, too, Dùvach came to think that he had dreamed, or at the
+least that Cathal had not interpreted the prophecy aright. For though
+Bride was of exceeding beauty, and of a holiness that made the young
+druids bow before her as though she were a bàndia, yet the world went on
+as before, and the days brought no change. Often, while she was still a
+child, he had questioned her about the words she had said as a babe, but
+she had no memory of them. Once, in her ninth year, he came upon her on
+the hillside of Dûn-I singing these self-same words. Her eyes dreamed
+far away. He bowed his head, and, praying to the Giver of Light, hurried
+to Cathal. The old man bade him speak no more to the child concerning
+the mysteries.
+
+Bride lived the hours of her days upon the slopes of Dûn-I, herding the
+sheep, or in following the kye upon the green hillocks and grassy dunes
+of what then, as now, was called the Machar. The beauty of the world was
+her daily food. The spirit within her was like sunlight behind a white
+flower. The birdeens in the green bushes sang for joy when they saw her
+blue eyes. The tender prayers that were in her heart were often seen
+flying above her head in the form of white doves of sunshine.
+
+But when the middle of the year came that was (though Dùvach had
+forgotten it) the year of the prophecy, his eldest son, Conn, who was
+now a man, murmured against the virginity of Bride, because of her
+beauty and because a chieftain of the mainland was eager to wed her. "I
+shall wed Bride or raid Ioua," was the message he had sent.
+
+So one day, before the Great Fire of the Summer Festival, Conn and his
+brothers reproached Bride.
+
+"Idle are these pure eyes, O Bride, not to be as lamps at thy
+marriage-bed."
+
+"Truly, it is not by the eyes that we live," replied the maiden gently,
+while to their fear and amazement she passed her hand before her face
+and let them see that the sockets were empty.
+
+Trembling with awe at this portent, Dùvach intervened:
+
+"By the sun I swear it, O Bride, that thou shalt marry whomsoever thou
+wilt and none other, and when thou wilt, or not at all, if such be thy
+will."
+
+And when he had spoken, Bride smiled, and passed her hand before her
+face again, and all there were abashed because of the blue light as of
+morning that was in her shining eyes.
+
+It was while the dew was yet wet on the grass that on the morrow Bride
+came out of her father's house, and went up the steep slope of Dûn-I.
+The crying of the ewes and lambs at the pastures came plaintively
+against the dawn. The lowing of the kye arose from the sandy hollows by
+the shore, or from the meadows on the lower slopes. Through the whole
+island went a rapid, trickling sound, most sweet to hear: the myriad
+voices of twittering birds, from the dotterel in the seaweed, to the
+larks climbing the blue slopes of heaven.
+
+This was the festival of her birth, and she was clad in white. About her
+waist was a girdle of the sacred rowan, the feathery green leaves
+flickering dusky shadows upon her robe as she moved. The light upon her
+yellow hair was as when morning wakes, laughing in wind amid the tall
+corn. As she went she sang to herself, softly as the crooning of a dove.
+If any had been there to hear he would have been abashed, for the words
+were not in Erse, and the eyes of the beautiful girl were as those of
+one in a vision.
+
+When, at last, a brief while before sunrise, she reached the summit of
+the Scuir, that is so small a hill and yet seems so big in Iona, where
+it is the sole peak, she found three young druids there, ready to tend
+the sacred fire the moment the sunrays should kindle it. Each was clad
+in a white robe, with fillets of oak leaves; and each had a golden
+armlet. They made a quiet obeisance as she approached. One stepped
+forward, with a flush in his face because of her beauty, that was as a
+sea-wave for grace and a flower for purity, as sunlight for joy and
+moonlight for peace.
+
+"Thou mayst draw near if thou wilt, Bride, daughter of Dùvach," he said,
+with something of reverence as well as of grave courtesy in his voice;
+"for the holy Cathal hath said that the breath of the Source of All is
+upon thee. It is not lawful for women to be here at this moment, but
+thou hast the law shining upon thy face and in thine eyes. Hast thou
+come to pray?"
+
+But at that moment a cry came from one of his companions. He turned, and
+rejoined his fellows. Then all three sank upon their knees, and with
+outstretched arms hailed the rising of God.
+
+As the sun rose, a solemn chant swelled from their lips, ascending as
+incense through the silent air. The glory of the new day came
+soundlessly. Peace was in the blue heaven, on the blue-green sea, and on
+the green land. There was no wind, even where the currents of the deep
+moved in shadowy purple. The sea itself was silent, making no more than
+a sighing slumber-breath round the white sands of the isle, or a dull
+whisper where the tide lifted the long weed that clung to the rocks.
+
+In what strange, mysterious way, Bride did not see; but as the three
+druids held their hands before the sacred fire there was a faint
+crackling, then three thin spirals of blue smoke rose, and soon dusky
+red and wan yellow tongues of flame moved to and fro. The sacrifice of
+God was made. Out of the immeasurable heaven He had come, in His golden
+chariot. Now, in the wonder and mystery of His love, He was re-born upon
+the world, re-born a little fugitive flame upon a low hill in a remote
+isle. Great must be His love that He could die thus daily in a thousand
+places: so great His love that he could give up His own body to daily
+death, and suffer the holy flame that was in the embers He illumined to
+be lighted and revered and then scattered to the four quarters of the
+world.
+
+Bride could bear no longer the mystery of this great love. It moved her
+to an ecstasy. What tenderness of divine love that could thus redeem the
+world daily: what long-suffering for all the evil and cruelty done
+hourly upon the weeping earth: what patience with the bitterness of the
+blind fates! The beauty of the worship of Be'al was upon her as a golden
+glory. Her heart leaped to a song that could not be sung.
+
+Bowing her head, so that the tears fell upon her hands, she rose and
+moved away.
+
+
+Elsewhere I have told how a good man of Iona sailed along the coast one
+Sabbath afternoon with the Holy Book, and put the Word upon the seals of
+Soa: and, in another tale, how a lonely man fought with a sea-woman
+that was a seal; as, again, how two fishermen strove with the sea-witch
+of Earraid: and, in "The Dan-nan-Ron," of a man who went mad with the
+sea-madness, because of the seal-blood that was in his veins, he being a
+MacOdrum of Uist, and one of the Sliochd nan Ron, the Tribe of the Seal.
+And those who have read the tale, twice printed, once as "The Annir
+Choille," and again as "Cathal of the Woods," will remember how, at the
+end, the good hermit Molios, when near death in his sea-cave of Arran,
+called the seals to come out of the wave and listen to him, so that he
+might tell them the white story of Christ; and how in the moonshine,
+with the flowing tide stealing from his feet to his knees, the old saint
+preached the gospel of love, while the seals crouched upon the rocks,
+with their brown eyes filled with glad tears: and how, before his death
+at dawn, he was comforted by hearing them splashing to and fro in the
+moon-dazzle, and calling one to the other, "We, too, are of the sons of
+God."
+
+What has so often been written about is a reflection of what is in the
+mind: and though stories of the seals may be heard from the Rhinns of
+Islay to the Seven Hunters (and I first heard that of the MacOdrums, the
+seal-folk, from a Uist man), I think that it was because of what I
+heard of the sea-people on Iona, when I was a child, that they have been
+so much with me in remembrance.
+
+In the short tale of the Moon-child, I told how two seals that had been
+wronged by a curse which had been put upon them by Columba, forgave the
+saint, and gave him a sore-won peace. I recall another (unpublished)
+tale, where a seal called Domnhuil Dhu--a name of evil omen--was heard
+laughing one Hallowe'en on the rocks below the ruined abbey, and calling
+to the creatures of the sea that God was dead: and how the man who heard
+him laughed, and was therewith stricken with paralysis, and so fell
+sidelong from the rocks into the deep wave, and was afterwards found
+beaten as with hammers and shredded as with sharp fangs.
+
+But, as most characteristic, I would rather tell here the story of Black
+Angus, though the longer tale of which it forms a part has been printed
+before.
+
+One night, a dark rainy night it was, with an uplift wind battering as
+with the palms of savage hands the heavy clouds that hid the moon, I
+went to the cottage near Spanish Port, where my friend Ivor Maclean
+lived with his old deaf mother. He had reluctantly promised to tell me
+the legend of Black Angus, a request he had ignored in a sullen silence
+when he and Padruic Macrae and I were on the Sound that day. No tales of
+the kind should be told upon the water.
+
+When I entered, he was sitting before the flaming coal-fire; for on Iona
+now, by decree of MacCailein Mòr, there is no more peat burned.
+
+"You will tell me now, Ivor?" was all I said.
+
+"Yes; I will be telling you now. And the reason why I never told you
+before was because it is not a wise or a good thing to tell ancient
+stories about the sea while still on the running wave. Macrae should not
+have done that thing. It may be we shall suffer for it when next we go
+out with the nets. We were to go to-night; but, no, not I, no, no, for
+sure, not for all the herring in the Sound."
+
+"Is it an ancient _sgeul_, Ivor?"
+
+"Ay. I am not for knowing the age of these things. It may be as old as
+the days of the Féinn, for all I know. It has come down to us. Alasdair
+MacAlasdair of Tiree, him that used to boast of having all the stories
+of Colum and Brigdhe, it was he told it to the mother of my mother, and
+she to me."
+
+"What is it called?"
+
+"Well, this and that; but there is no harm in saying it is called the
+Dark Nameless One."
+
+"The Dark Nameless One!"
+
+"It is this way. But will you ever have heard of the MacOdrums of Uist?"
+
+"Ay; the Sliochd-nan-ròn."
+
+"That is so. God knows. The Sliochd-nan-ron ... the progeny of the
+Seal.... Well, well, no man knows what moves in the shadow of life. And
+now I will be telling you that old ancient tale, as it was given to me
+by the mother of my mother."
+
+
+On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The
+monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some
+at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the _Faoilleach
+Geamhraidh_, the day that is called _Am Fhéill Brighde_, and that they
+call Candlemas over yonder.
+
+The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He
+was praying and praying; and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud,
+the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold,
+and the butterfly break its shroud.
+
+Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks,
+with wicked eyes.
+
+"My blessing upon you, O Ròn," he said, with the good kind courteousness
+that was his. "_Droch spadadh ort_," answered the seal, "A bad end to
+you, Colum of the Gown."
+
+"Sure now," said Colum angrily, "I am knowing by that curse that you are
+no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For
+here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and it
+is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the
+holy white robe I wear."
+
+"Well, well," replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it
+were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I,
+or the blind wind can say; "well, well, let that thing be: it's a
+wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a druid you are,
+whether of fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where
+my little daughter."
+
+At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.
+
+"It is a man you were once, O Ròn?"
+
+"Maybe ay and maybe no."
+
+"And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north
+isles you come?"
+
+"That is a true thing."
+
+"Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the
+race of Odrum the Pagan?"
+
+"Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus
+MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is
+Black Angus."
+
+"A fitting name too," said Colum the Holy, "because of the black sin in
+your heart, and the black end God has in store for you."
+
+At that Black Angus laughed.
+
+"Why is the laughter upon you, Man-Seal?"
+
+"Well, it is because of the good company I'll be having. But, now, give
+me the word: Are you for having seen or heard of a woman called Kirsteen
+M'Vurich?"
+
+"Kirsteen--Kirsteen--that is the good name of a nun it is, and no
+sea-wanton!"
+
+"O, a name here or a name there is soft sand. And so you cannot be for
+telling me where my woman is?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then a stake for your belly, and nails through your hands, thirst on
+your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!"
+
+And, with that, Black Angus louped into the green water, and the hoarse
+wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon the shore like
+a wind-spent mew.
+
+Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. "God is good," he
+said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there
+came a daisy into the grass, or a bird rose, with song to it for the
+first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.
+
+As he drew near to the House of God he met Murtagh, an old monk of the
+ancient race of the isles.
+
+"Who is Kirsteen M'Vurich, Murtagh?" he asked.
+
+"She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum,
+till Black Angus won her to the sea."
+
+"And when was that?"
+
+"Nigh upon a thousand years ago."
+
+"But can mortal sin live as long as that?"
+
+"Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisìn sang, before Fionn,
+before Cuchullin, was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the
+Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made
+the woman Kirsteen M'Vurich leave the place of prayer and go down to
+the sea-shore, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and
+she followed him into the sea."
+
+"And is death above her now?"
+
+"No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out
+yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called the sea-witch."
+
+"Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her
+there?"
+
+"It is the Doom. It is Adam's first wife she is, that sea-witch over
+there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks."
+
+"And who will he be?"
+
+"His body is the body of Angus, the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum,
+for all that a seal he is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas."
+
+"Black Judas, Murtagh?"
+
+"Ay, Black Judas, Colum."
+
+
+But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying
+that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a
+wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one
+upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a
+seamew that was like a human thing.
+
+So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes
+and said, "God be with us"; and then I opened the door, and the salt
+smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness
+of the night.
+
+
+When I was a child I used to throw offerings--small coins, flowers,
+shells, even a newly caught trout, once a treasured flint
+arrow-head--into the sea-loch by which we lived. My Hebridean nurse had
+often told me of Shony, a mysterious sea-god, and I know I spent much
+time in wasted adoration: a fearful worship, not unmixed with
+disappointment and some anger. Not once did I see him. I was frighted
+time after time, but the sudden cry of a heron, or the snort of a
+pollack chasing the mackerel, or the abrupt uplifting of a seal's head,
+became over-familiar, and I desired terror, and could not find it by the
+shore. Inland, after dusk, there was always the mysterious multitude of
+shadow. There too, I could hear the wind leaping and growling. But by
+the shore I never knew any dread, even in the darkest night. The sound
+and company of the sea washed away all fears.
+
+I was amused not long ago to hear a little girl singing, as she ran
+wading through the foam of a troubled sunlit sea, as it broke on those
+wonderful white sands of Iona--
+
+    "Shanny, Shanny, Shanny,
+    Catch my feet and tickle my toes!
+    And if you can, Shanny, Shanny, Shanny,
+    I'll go with you where no one knows!"
+
+I have no doubt this daintier Shanny was my old friend Shony, whose more
+terrifying way was to clutch boats by the keel and drown the sailors,
+and make a death-necklace of their teeth. An evil Shony; for once he
+netted a young girl who was swimming in a loch, and when she would not
+give him her love he tied her to a rock, and to this day her long brown
+hair may be seen floating in the shallow green wave at the ebb of the
+tide. One need not name the place!
+
+The Shanny song recalls to me an old Gaelic alphabet rhyme, wherein a
+_Maigh-deann-M'hara_, or Mermaid, stood for M, and a Suire (also a
+mermaid) stood for S; and my long perplexities as to whether I would
+know a shuera from a midianmara when I saw either. It also recalls to me
+that it was from a young schoolmaster priest, who had come back from
+Ireland to die at home, that I first heard of the Beth-Luis-Nuin, the
+Gaelic equivalent of "the A B C." Every letter in the Gaelic alphabet
+is represented by a tree, and Beithe and Luis and Nuin are the Birch,
+the Rowan, and the Ash. The reason why the alphabet is called the
+Beth-Luis-Nuin is that B, L, N, and not A, B, C, are its first three
+letters. It consists of eighteen letters--and in ancient Gaelic
+seventeen, for H (the Uath, or Whitethorn) does not exist there, I
+believe: and these run, B, L, N, F, S (H), D, T, C, M, G, P, R, A, O, U,
+E, I--each letter represented by the name of a tree, Birch, Rowan, Ash,
+etc. Properly, there is no C in Gaelic, for though the letter C is
+common, it has always the sound of K.
+
+Since this page first appeared I have had so many letters about the
+Gaelic alphabet of to-day that I take the opportunity to add a few
+lines. To-day as of old all the letters of the Gaelic alphabet are
+called after trees, from the oak to the shrub-like elder, with the
+exception of G, T, and U, which stand for Ivy, Furze and Heather. It no
+longer runs B, L, N, etc., but in sequence follows the familiar and
+among western peoples, universal A, B, C, etc. It is, however, short of
+our Roman alphabet by eight letters J, K, Q, V, W, X, Y and Z. On the
+other hand, each of these is represented, either by some other letter
+having a like value or by a combination: thus K is identical with C,
+which does not exist in Gaelic as a soft sound any more than it does in
+Greek, but only as the C in English words such as _cat_ or _cart_, or in
+combination with h as a gutteral as in _loch_--while v as common a sound
+in Gaelic as the hiss of s in English exists in almost every second or
+third word as _bh_ or _mh_. The Gaelic A, B, C of to-day, then, runs as
+follows: Ailm, Beite, Coll, Durr, Eagh, Fearn, Gath, Huath, Togh, Luis,
+Muin, Nuin, Oir, Peith, Ruis, Suil, Teine, Ur--which again is equivalent
+to saying Elm, Birch, Hazel, Oak, Aspen, Alder, Ivy, Whitethorn, Yew,
+Rowan or Quicken, Vine, Ash, Spindle-tree, Pine, Elder, Willow, Furze,
+Heath.
+
+The little girl who knew so much about Shanny knew nothing about her own
+A B C. But I owe her a debt, since through her I came upon my good
+friend "Gunainm." From her I heard first, there on Iona, on a chance
+visit of a few summer days, of two of the most beautiful of the ancient
+Gaelic hymns, the Fiacc Hymn and the Hymn of Broccán. My friend had
+delineated them as missals, with a strangely beautiful design to each.
+How often I have thought of one, illustrative of a line in the Fiacc
+Hymn: "There was pagan darkness in Eiré in those days: the people
+adored Faerie." In the Broccán Hymn (composed by one Broccán in the time
+of Lugaid, son of Loegaire, A.D. 500) is one particularly lovely line:
+"Victorious Bride (Briget) loved not this vain world: here, ever, she
+sat the seat of a bird on a cliff."
+
+In a dream I dream frequently, that of being the wind, and drifting over
+fragrant hedgerows and pastures, I have often, through unconscious
+remembrance of that image of St. Bride sitting the seat of a bird on the
+edge of the cliff that is this world, felt myself, when not lifted on
+sudden warm fans of dusk, propelled as on a swift wing from the edge of
+a precipice.
+
+I would that we had these winds of dream to command. I would, now that I
+am far from it, that this night at least I might pass over Iona, and
+hear the sea-doves by the ruins making their sweet mournful croon of
+peace, and lift, as a shadow gathering phantom flowers, the pale orchis
+by the lapwing's nest.
+
+
+One day, walking by a reedy lochan on the Ross of Mull, not far inland
+from Fionnaphort, where is the ferry for Baile-Mòr of Iona, I met an old
+man who seemed in sorrow. When he spoke I was puzzled by some words
+which were not native there, and then I learned that he had long lived
+in Edinburgh and later in Dunfermline, and in his work had associated
+with Hollanders and others of the east seas.
+
+He had come back, in his old age, to "see the place of his two
+loves"--the hamlet in Earraid, where his old mother had blessed him
+"forty year back," and the little farm where Jean Cameron had kissed him
+and promised to be true. He had gone away as a soldier, and news reached
+them of his death; and when he came out of the Indies, and went up Leith
+Walk to the great post-house in Edinburgh, it was to learn that the
+Earraid cottage was empty, and that Jean was no longer Jean Cameron.
+
+There was not a touch of bitterness in the old man's words. "It was my
+name, for one thing," he said simply: "you see, there's many a 'J.
+Macdonald' in the Highland regiments; and the mistake got about that
+way. No, no--the dear lass wasna to blame. And I never lost her love.
+When I found out where she was I went to see her once more, an' to tell
+her I understood, an' loved her all the same. It was hard, in a way,
+when I found she had made a loveless marriage, but human nature's human
+nature, an' I could not but be proud and glad that she had nane but
+puir Jamie Macdonald in her heart. I told her I would be true to her,
+and since she was poor, would help her, an' wi' God's kindness true I
+was, an' helped her too. For her man did an awfu' business one day, and
+was sentenced for life. She had three bairns. Well, I keepit her an'
+them--though I ne'er saw them but once in the year, for she had come
+back to the west, her heart brast with the towns. First one bairn died,
+then another. Then Jean died."
+
+The old man resumed suddenly: "I had put all my savings into the Grand
+North Bank. When that failed I had nothing, for with the little that was
+got back I bought a good 'prenticeship for Jean's eldest. Since then
+I've lived by odd jobs. But I'm old now, an' broke. Every day an' every
+night I think o' them two, my mother an' Jean."
+
+"She must have been a leal fine woman," I said, but in Gaelic. With a
+flash he looked at me, and then said slowly, as if remembering, "_Eudail
+de mhnathan an domhain_," "Treasure of all the women in the world."
+
+I have often thought of old "Jamie Macdonald" since. How wonderful his
+deep love! This man was loyal to his love in long absence, and was not
+less loyal when he found that she was the wife of another; and gave up
+thought of home and comfort and companionship, so that he might make
+life more easy for her and the children that were not his. He had no
+outer reward for this, nor looked for any.
+
+We crossed to Baile-Mòr together, and when I came upon him next day by
+the Reilig Odhrain, I asked him what he thought of Iona.
+
+He looked at the grey worn stones, "the stairway of the kings," the
+tombs, the carved crosses, the grey ruins of the wind-harried cathedral,
+and with a wave of his hand, said simply, "_Comunn mo ghaoil_," "'Tis a
+companionship after my heart."
+
+I do not doubt that the old man went on his way comforted by the grey
+silence and grey beauty of this ancient place, and that he found in Iona
+what would be near him for the rest of his days.
+
+
+As a child I had some wise as well as foolish instruction concerning the
+nations of Faerie. If, in common with nearly all happy children, I was
+brought up in intimate, even in circumstantial, knowledge of "the
+fairies"--being charitably taught, for one thing, so that I have often
+left a little bowl of milk, a saucerful of oatcake and honey, and the
+like, under a wooden seat, where they would be sure to see it--I was
+told also of the Sìdhe, often so rashly and ignorantly alluded to as the
+fairies in the sense of a pretty, diminutive, harmless, natural folk;
+and by my nurse Barabal instructed in some of the ways, spells,
+influences, and even appearances of these powerful and mysterious clans.
+
+I do not think, unless as a very young child, I ever confused them. I
+recollect well my pleasure at a sign of gratitude. I was fond of making
+little reed or bulrush or ash flutes, but once I was in a place where
+these were difficult to get, and I lost the only one I had. That night I
+put aside a small portion of my supper of bread and milk and honey, and
+remember also the sacrifice of a gooseberry of noble proportions,
+relinquished, not without a sigh, in favour of any wandering fairy lad.
+
+Next morning when I ran out--three of us then had a wild morning
+performance we called some fantastic, forgotten name, and ourselves the
+Sun-dancers--I saw by the emptied saucer my little reed-flute! Here was
+proof positive! I was so grateful for that fairy's gratitude, that when
+dusk came again I not only left a larger supper-dole than usual, but,
+decked with white fox-glove bells (in which I had unbounded faith), sat
+drenched in the dew and played my little reed. Any moment (I was sure) a
+small green fellow would appear, and with wild indignation I found
+myself snatched from the grass, and my ears dinned now with reproaches
+about the dew, now with remonstrances against "that frightfu'
+reed-screeching that scared awa' the varry hens."
+
+Ah, there are souls that know nothing of fairies, or music!
+
+But the Sìdhe are a very different people from the small clans of the
+earth's delight.
+
+However (though I could write of both a great volume), I have little to
+say of either just now, except in one connection.
+
+It is commonly said that the People of the Sìdhe dwell within the hills,
+or in the underworld. In some of the isles their home, now, is spoken of
+as Tir-na-thonn, the Land of the Wave, or Tir-fo-Tuinn, the Land under
+the Sea.
+
+But from a friend, an Islander of Iona, I have learned many things, and
+among them, that the Shee no longer dwell within the inland hills, and
+that though many of them inhabit the lonelier isles of the west, and in
+particular The Seven Hunters, their Kingdom is in the North.
+
+Some say it is among the pathless mountains of Iceland. But my friend
+spoke to an Iceland man, and he said he had never seen them. There were
+Secret People there, but not the Gaelic Sìdhe.
+
+Their Kingdom is in the North, under the _Fir-Chlisneach_, the Dancing
+Men, as the Hebrideans call the polar aurora. They are always young
+there. Their bodies are white as the wild swan, their hair yellow as
+honey, their eyes blue as ice. Their feet leave no mark on the snow. The
+women are white as milk, with eyes like sloes, and lips like red rowans.
+They fight with shadows, and are glad; but the shadows are not shadows
+to them. The Shee slay great numbers at the full moon, but never hunt on
+moonless nights, or at the rising of the moon, or when the dew is
+falling. Their lances are made of reeds that glitter like shafts of ice,
+and it is ill for a mortal to find one of these lances, for it is tipped
+with the salt of a wave that no living thing has touched, neither the
+wailing mew nor the finned sgádan nor his tribe, nor the narwhal. There
+are no men of the human clans there, and no shores, and the tides are
+forbidden.
+
+Long ago one of the monks of Columba sailed there. He sailed for thrice
+seven days till he lost the rocks of the north; and for thrice thirty
+days, till Iceland in the south was like a small bluebell in a great
+grey plain; and for thrice three years among bergs. For the first three
+years the finned things of the sea brought him food; for the second
+three years he knew the kindness of the creatures of the air; in the
+last three years angels fed him. He lived among the Sìdhe for three
+hundred years. When he came back to Iona, he was asked where he had been
+all that long night since evensong to matins. The monks had sought him
+everywhere, and at dawn had found him lying in the hollow of the long
+wave that washes Iona on the north. He laughed at that, and said he had
+been on the tops of the billows for nine years and three months and
+twenty-one days, and for three hundred years had lived among a deathless
+people. He had drunk sweet ale every day, and every day had known love
+among flowers and green bushes, and at dusk had sung old beautiful
+forgotten songs, and with star-flame had lit strange fires, and at the
+full of the moon had gone forth laughing to slay. It was heaven, there,
+under the Lights of the North. When he was asked how that people might
+be known, he said that away from there they had a cold, cold hand, a
+cold, still voice, and cold ice-blue eyes. They had four cities at the
+four ends of the green diamond that is the world. That in the north was
+made of earth; that in the east, of air; that in the south, of fire;
+that in the west, of water. In the middle of the green diamond that is
+the world is the Glen of Precious Stones. It is in the shape of a heart,
+and glows like a ruby, though all stones and gems are there. It is there
+the Sìdhe go to refresh their deathless life.
+
+The holy monks said that this kingdom was certainly Ifurin, the Gaelic
+Hell. So they put their comrade alive in a grave in the sand, and
+stamped the sand down upon his head, and sang hymns so that mayhap even
+yet his soul might be saved, or, at least, that when he went back to
+that place he might remember other songs than those sung by the
+milk-white women with eyes like sloes and lips red as rowans. "Tell that
+honey-mouthed cruel people they are in Hell," said the abbot, "and give
+them my ban and my curse unless they will cease laughing and loving
+sinfully and slaying with bright lances, and will come out of their
+secret places and be baptized."
+
+They have not yet come.
+
+This adventurer of the dreaming mind is another Oran, that fabulous Oran
+of whom the later Columban legends tell. I think that other Orans go
+out, even yet, to the Country of the Sìdhe. But few come again. It must
+be hard to find that glen at the heart of the green diamond that is the
+world; but, when found, harder to return by the way one came.
+
+
+Once when I was sailing to Tiree, I stopped at Iona, and went to see an
+old woman named Giorsal. She was of my own people, and, not being
+Iona-born, the islanders called her the foreigner. She had a daughter
+named Ealàsaidh, or Elsie as it is generally given in English, and I
+wanted to see her even more than the old woman.
+
+"Where is Elsie?" I asked, after our greetings were done.
+
+Giorsal looked at me sidelong, and then shifted the kettle, and busied
+herself with the teapot.
+
+I repeated the question.
+
+"She is gone," the old woman said, without looking at me.
+
+"Gone? Where has she gone to?"
+
+"I might as well ask you to tell me that."
+
+"Is she married ... had she a lover ... or ... or ... do you mean that
+she ... that you ... have lost her?"
+
+"She's gone. That's all I know. But she isn't married, so far as I know:
+an' I never knew any man she fancied: an' neither I nor any other on
+Iona has seen her dead body; an' by St. Martin's Cross, neither I nor
+any other saw her leave the island. And that was more than a year ago."
+
+"But, Giorsal, she must have left Iona and gone to Mull, or maybe gone
+away in a steamer, or----"
+
+"It was in midwinter, an' when a heavy gale was tearing through the
+Sound. There was no steamer an' no boat that day. There isn't a boat of
+Iona that could have taken the sea that day. And no--Elsie wasna
+drowned. I see that's what's in your mind. She just went out o' the
+house again cryin'. I asked her what was wrong wi' her. She turned an'
+smiled, an' because o' that terrifying smile I couldna say a word. She
+went up behind the Ruins, an' no one saw her after that but Ian Donn. He
+saw her among the bulrushes in the swamp over by Staonaig. She was
+laughing an' talking to the reeds, or to the wind in the reeds. So Ian
+Donn says."
+
+"And what do _you_ say, Giorsal?"
+
+The old woman went to the door, looked out, and closed it. When she
+returned, she put another bit on the fire, and kept her gaze on the red
+glow.
+
+"Do you know much about them old Iona monks?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"What old monks?"
+
+"Them as they call the Culdees. You used to be askin' lots o' questions
+about them. Ay? well ... they aye hated folk from the North, an'
+women-folk above all."
+
+I waited, silent.
+
+"And Elsie, poor lass, she hated them in turn. She was all for the wild
+clansmen out o' Skye and the Long Island. She said she wished the Siól
+Leoid had come to Iona before Colum built the big church. And for why?
+Well, there's this, for one thing: For months a monk had come to her o'
+nights in her sleep, an' said he would kill her, because she was a
+heathen. She went to the minister at last, an' said her say. He told her
+she was a foolish wench, an' was sore angry with her. So then she went
+to old Mary Gillespie, out by the lochan beyond Fionnaphort on the Ross
+yonder--her that has the sight an' a power o' the old wisdom. After that
+she took to meeting friends in the moonshine."
+
+"Friends?"
+
+"Ay. There's no call to name names. One day she told me that she had
+been bidden to go over to them. If she didn't, the monks would kill her,
+they said. The monks are still the strongest here, they told her, or she
+me, I forget which. That is, except over by Staonaig. Up between Sgéur
+Iolaire and Cnoc Druidean there's a path that no monk can go. There, in
+the old days, they burned a woman. She was not a woman, but they thought
+she was. She was one o' the Sorrows of the Sheen, that they put out to
+suffer for them, an' get the mortal ill. That's the plague to _them_.
+It's ill to any that brings harm on _them_. That's why the monks arena
+strong over by Staonaig way. But I told my girl not to mind. She was
+safe wi' me, I said. She said that was true. For weeks I heard no more
+o' that monk. One night Elsie came in smiling an' pluckin' wild roses.
+'_Breisleach_!' I cried, 'what's the meanin' o' roses in January?' She
+looked at me, frighted, an' said nothin', but threw the things on the
+fire. It was next day she went away."
+
+"And----"
+
+"An' that's all. Here's the tea. Ay, an' for sure here's my good man.
+_Whist_, now! Rob, do you see who's here?"
+
+Nothing is more strange than the confused survival of legends and pagan
+faiths and early Christian beliefs, such as may be found still in some
+of the isles. A Tiree man, whom I met some time ago on the boat that was
+taking us both to the west, told me there's a story that Mary Magdalene
+lies in a cave in Iona. She roamed the world with a blind man who loved
+her, but they had no sin. One day they came to Knoidart in Argyll. Mary
+Magdalene's first husband had tracked her there, and she knew that he
+would kill the blind man. So she bade him lie down among some swine, and
+she herself herded them. But her husband came and laughed at her. "That
+is a fine boar you have there," he said. Then he put a spear through the
+blind man. "Now I will take your beautiful hair," he said. He did this
+and went away. She wept till she died. One of Colum's monks found her,
+and took her to Iona, and she was buried in a cave. No one but Colum
+knew who she was. Colum sent away the man, because he was always mooning
+and lamenting. She had a great wonderful beauty to her.
+
+It is characteristic enough, even to the quaint confusion that could
+make Mary Magdalene and St. Columba contemporary. But as for the story,
+what is it but the universal Gaelic legend of Diarmid and Grania? They
+too wandered far to escape the avenger. It does not matter that their
+"beds" are shown in rock and moor, from Glenmoriston to Loch Awe, from
+Lora Water to West Loch Tarbert, with an authenticity as absolute as
+that which discovers them almost anywhere between Donegal and Clare; nor
+that the death-place has many sites betwixt Argyll and Connemara. In
+Gaelic Scotland every one knows that Diarmid was wounded to the death on
+the rocky ground between Tarbert of Loch Fyne and the West Loch. Every
+one knows the part the boar played, and the part Finn played.
+
+Doubtless the story came by way of the Shannon to the Loch of Shadows,
+or from Cuchullin's land to Dûn Sobhairce on the Antrim coast, and
+thence to the Scottish mainland. In wandering to the isles, it lost
+something both of Eiré and Alba. The Campbells, too, claimed Diarmid;
+and so the Hebrideans would as soon forget him. So, there, by one byplay
+of the mind or another, it survived in changing raiment. Perhaps an
+islesman had heard a strange legend about Mary Magdalene, and so named
+Grania anew. Perhaps a story-teller consciously wove it the new way.
+Perhaps an Iona man, hearing the tale in distant Barra or Uist, in Coll
+or Tiree, "buried" Mary in a cave of Icolmkill.
+
+The notable thing is, not that a primitive legend should love fantastic
+raiment, but that it should be so much alike, where the Syrian wanders
+from waste to waste, by the camp-fires of the Basque muleteers, and in
+the rainy lands of the Gael.
+
+In Mingulay, one of the south isles of the Hebrides, in South Uist, and
+in Iona, I have heard a practically identical tale told with striking
+variations. It is a tale so wide-spread that it has given rise to a
+pathetic proverb, "Is mairg a loisgeadh a chlarsach dut," "Pity on him
+who would burn the harp for you."
+
+In Mingulay, the "harper" who broke his "harp" for a woman's love was a
+young man, a fiddler. For three years he wandered out of the west into
+the east, and when he had made enough money to buy a good share in a
+fishing-boat, or even a boat itself, he came back to Mingulay. When he
+reached his Mary's cottage, at dusk, he played her favourite air, an
+"oran leannanachd," but when she came out it was with a silver ring on
+her left hand and a baby in her arms. Thus poor Padruig Macneill knew
+Mary had broken her troth and married another man, and so he went down
+to the shore and played a "marbh-rann," and then broke his fiddle on the
+rocks; and when they came upon them in the morning he had the strings of
+it round his neck. In Uist, the instrument is more vaguely called a
+"tiompan," and here, on a bitter cold night in a famine time, the
+musician breaks it so as to feed the fire to warm his wife--a sacrifice
+ill repaid by the elopement of the hard woman that night. In Iona, the
+tale is of an Irish piper who came over to Icolmkill on a pilgrimage,
+and to lay his "peeb-h'yanna"[5] on "the holy stones"; but, when there,
+he got word that his young wife was ill, so he "made a loan of his
+clar," and with the money returned to Derry, only to find that his dear
+had gone away with a soldier for the Americas.
+
+The legendary history of Iona would be as much Pagan as Christian.
+To-day, at many a _ceilidh_ by the warm hearths in winter, one may hear
+allusions to the Scandinavian pirates, or to their more ancient and
+obscure kin, the Fomór.... The Fomór or Fomórians were a people that
+lived before the Gael, and had their habitations on the isles: fierce
+prowlers of the sea, who loved darkness and cold and storm, and drove
+herds of wolves across the deeps. In other words, they were elemental
+forces. But the name is sometimes used for the Norse pirates who ravaged
+the west, from the Lews to the town of the Hurdle-ford.
+
+In poetic narration "the men of Lochlin" occurs oftener: sometimes the
+Summer-sailors, as the Vikings called themselves; sometimes, perhaps
+oftenest, the Danes. The Vikings have left numerous personal names among
+the islanders, notably the general term "summer-sailors," _somerlédi_,
+which survives as Somerled. Many Macleods and Macdonalds are called
+Somerled, Torquil (also Torcall, Thorkill), and Mànus (Magnus), and in
+the Hebrides surnames such as Odrum betray a Norse origin. A glance at
+any good map will reveal how largely the capes and promontories and
+headlands, and small bays and havens of the west, remember the lords of
+the Suderöer.
+
+The fascination of this legendary history is in its contrast of the
+barbaric and the spiritual. Since I was a child I have been held
+spellbound by this singular union. To see the Virgin Mary in the sombre
+and terrible figure of the Washer of the Ford, or spiritual destiny in
+that of the Woman with the Net, was natural: as to believe that the
+same Columba could be as tender as St. Bride or gentle as St. Francis,
+and yet could thrust the living Oran back into his grave, or prophesy,
+as though himself a believer in the druidic wisdom, by the barking of a
+favourite hound that had a white spot on his forehead--_Donnalaich chon
+chinain_.
+
+
+Of this characteristic blending of pagan and Christian thought and
+legend I have tried elsewhere to convey some sense--oftener, perhaps,
+have instinctively expressed: and here, as they are apposite to Iona, I
+would like to select some pages as representative of three
+phases--namely, of the barbaric history of Iona, of the primitive
+spiritual history which is so childlike in its simplicity, and of that
+direct grafting of Christian thought and imagery upon pagan thought and
+imagery which at one time, and doubtless for many generations (for it
+still survives), was a normal unconscious method. Some five years ago I
+wrote three short Columban stories, collectively called _The Three
+Marvels of Iona_, one named "The Festival of the Birds," another "The
+Sabbath of the Fishes and the Flies," and the third "The Moon-Child." It
+is the second of these that, somewhat altered to its present use by
+running into it part of another Columban tale, I add now.
+
+
+Before dawn, on the morning of the hundredth Sabbath after Colum the
+White had made glory to God in Hy, that was theretofore called Ioua, or
+the Druid Isle, and is now Iona, the saint beheld his own sleep in a
+vision.
+
+Much fasting and long pondering over the missals, with their golden and
+azure and sea-green initials and earth-brown branching letters, had made
+Colum weary. He had brooded much of late upon the mystery of the living
+world that was not man's world.
+
+On the eve of that hundredth Sabbath, which was to be a holy festival in
+Iona, he had talked long with an ancient greybeard out of a remote isle
+in the north, the wild Isle of the Mountains, where Scathach the queen
+hanged the men of Lochlin by their yellow hair.
+
+This man's name was Ardan, and he was of the ancient people. He had come
+to Iona because of two things. Maolmòr, the king of the northern Picts,
+had sent him to learn of Colum what was this god-teaching he had brought
+out of Eiré: and for himself he had come when old age was upon him, to
+see what manner of man this Colum was, who had made Ioua, that was
+"Innis-nan-Dhruidhnean"--the Isle of the Druids--into a place of new
+worship.
+
+For three hours Ardan and Colum had walked by the sea-shore. Each
+learned of the other. Ardan bowed his head before the wisdom. Colum knew
+in his heart that the Druid saw mysteries.
+
+In the first hour they talked of God.
+
+"Ay, sure: and now," said the saint, "O Ardan the wise, is my God thy
+God?"
+
+At that Ardan turned his eyes to the west. With his right hand he
+pointed to the sun that was like a great golden flower. "Truly, He is
+thy God and my God." Colum was silent. Then he said: "Thee and thine, O
+Ardan, from Maolmòr the Pictish king to the least of his slaves, shall
+have a long weariness in Hell. That fiery globe yonder is but the Lamp
+of the World: and sad is the case of the man who knows not the torch
+from the torch-bearer."
+
+In the second hour they talked of Man. While Ardan spoke, Colum smiled
+in his deep, grey eyes.
+
+"It is for laughter that," he said, when Ardan ceased.
+
+"And why will that be, O Colum Cille?" Ardan asked. Then the smile went
+out of Colum's grey eyes, and he turned and looked about him.
+
+He saw near, a crow, a horse, and a hound.
+
+"These are thy brethren," he said scornfully.
+
+But Ardan answered quietly, "Even so."
+
+The third hour they talked about the beasts of the earth and the fowls
+of the air.
+
+At the last Ardan said: "The ancient wisdom hath it that these are the
+souls of men and women that have been, or are to be." Whereat Colum
+answered: "The new wisdom, that is old as eternity, declareth that God
+created all things in love. Therefore are we at one, O Ardan, though we
+sail to the Isle of Truth from the west and the east. Let there be peace
+between us." "Peace," said Ardan.
+
+That eve, Ardan of the Picts sat with the monks of Iona.
+
+Colum blessed him and said a saying. Cathal of the Songs sang a hymn of
+beauty. Ardan rose, and put the wine of guests to his lips, and chanted
+this rann:
+
+    O Colum and monks of Christ,
+    It is peace we are having this night:
+    Sure, peace is a good thing,
+    And I am glad with the gladness.
+
+    We worship one God,
+    Though ye call him Dia--
+    And I say not, O Dè!
+    But cry _Bea'uil Bêl_!
+
+    For it is one faith for man,
+    And one for the living world,
+    And no man is wiser than another--
+    And none knoweth much.
+
+    None knoweth a better thing than this:
+    The Sword, Love, Song, Honour, Sleep.
+    None knoweth a surer thing than this:
+    Birth, Sorrow, Pain, Weariness, Death.
+
+    Sure, peace is a good thing;
+    Let us be glad of peace:
+    We are not men of the Sword,
+    But of the Rune and the Wisdom.
+
+    I have learned a truth of Colum,
+    And he hath learned of me:
+    All ye on the morrow shall see
+    A wonder of the wonders.
+
+Ardan would say no more after that, though all besought him. Many
+pondered long that night. Cathal made a song of mystery. Colum brooded
+through the dark; but before dawn he fell asleep upon the fern that
+strewed his cell. At dawn, with waking eyes, and weary, he saw his Sleep
+in a vision.
+
+It stood grey and wan beside him.
+
+"What art thou, O Spirit?" he said.
+
+"I am thy Sleep, Colum."
+
+"And is it peace?"
+
+"It is peace."
+
+"What wouldst thou?"
+
+"I have wisdom. Thy mind and thy soul were closed. I could not give what
+I brought. I brought wisdom."
+
+"Give it."
+
+"Behold!"
+
+And Colum, sitting upon the strewed fern that was his bed, rubbed his
+eyes that were heavy with weariness and fasting and long prayer. He
+could not see his Sleep now. It was gone as smoke that is licked up by
+the wind....
+
+For three days thereafter Colum fasted, save for a handful of meal at
+dawn, a piece of rye-bread at noon, and a mouthful of dulse and
+spring-water at sun-down. On the night of the third day, Oran and Keir
+came to him in his cell. Colum was on his knees lost in prayer. No sound
+was there, save the faint whispered muttering of his lips and on the
+plastered wall the weary buzzing of a fly.
+
+"Holy One!" said Oran in a low voice, soft with pity and awe; "Holy
+One!"
+
+But Colum took no notice. His lips still moved, and the tangled hairs
+below his nether lip shivered with his failing breath.
+
+"Father!" said Keir, tender as a woman; "Father!"
+
+Colum did not turn his eyes from the wall. The fly droned his drowsy hum
+upon the rough plaster. It crawled wearily for a space, then stopped.
+The slow hot drone filled the cell.
+
+"Father," said Oran, "it is the will of the brethren that thou shouldst
+break thy fast. Thou art old, and God has thy glory. Give us peace."
+
+"Father," urged Keir, seeing that Colum kneeled unnoticingly, his lips
+still moving above his grey beard, with the white hair of him falling
+about his head like a snowdrift slipping from a boulder. "Father, be
+pitiful! We hunger and thirst for thy presence. We can fast no longer,
+yet we have no heart to break our fast if thou art not with us. Come,
+holy one, and be of our company, and eat of the good broiled fish that
+awaiteth us. We perish for the benediction of thine eyes."
+
+Then it was that Colum rose, and walked slowly towards the wall.
+
+"Little black beast," he said to the fly that droned its drowsy hum and
+moved not at all; "little black beast, sure it is well I am knowing
+what you are. You are thinking you are going to get my blessing, you
+that have come out of hell for the soul of me!"
+
+At that the fly flew heavily from the wall, and slowly circled round and
+round the head of Colum the White.
+
+"What think ye of that, brother Oran, brother Keir?" he asked in a low
+voice, hoarse because of his long fast and the weariness that was upon
+him.
+
+"It is a fiend," said Oran.
+
+"It is an angel," said Keir.
+
+Thereupon the fly settled upon the wall again, and again droned his
+drowsy hot hum.
+
+"Little black beast," said Colum, with the frown coming down into his
+eyes, "is it for peace you are here, or for sin? Answer, I conjure you
+in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!"
+
+"_An ainn an Athar, 's an Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh_," repeated Oran
+below his breath.
+
+"_An ainn an Athar, 's an Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh_," repeated Keir
+below his breath.
+
+Then the fly that was upon the wall flew up to the roof and circled to
+and fro. And it sang a beautiful song, and its song was this:
+
+    Praise be to God, and a blessing too at that, and a blessing!
+    For Colum the White, Colum the Dove, hath worshipped;
+    Yea, he hath worshipped and made of a desert a garden,
+    And out of the dung of men's souls have made a sweet savour of
+      burning.
+
+    A savour of burning, most sweet, a fire for the altar,
+    This he hath made in the desert; the hell-saved all gladden.
+    Sure he hath put his benison, too, on milch-cow and bullock,
+    On the fowls of the air, and the man-eyed seals, and the otter.
+
+    But high in His Dûn in the great blue mainland of heaven,
+    God the All-Father broodeth, where the harpers are harping His
+      glory:
+    There where He sitteth, where a river of ale poureth ever,
+    His great sword broken, His spear in the dust, He broodeth.
+
+    And this is the thought that moves in his brain, as a cloud filled
+      with thunder
+    Moves through the vast hollow sky filled with the dust of the
+      stars--
+    "What boots it the glory of Colum, when he maketh a Sabbath to bless
+      me,
+    And hath no thought of my sons in the deeps of the air and the sea?"
+
+And with that the fly passed from their vision. In the cell was a most
+wondrous sweet song, like the sound of far-off pipes over water.
+
+Oran said in a low voice of awe, "O God, our God!"
+
+Keir whispered, white with fear, "O God, my God!"
+
+But Colum rose, and took a scourge from where it hung on the wall. "It
+shall be for peace, Oran," he said, with a grim smile flitting like a
+bird above the nest of his grey beard; "it shall be for peace, Keir!"
+
+And with that he laid the scourge heavily upon the bent backs of Keir
+and Oran, nor stayed his hand, nor let his three days' fast weaken the
+deep piety that was in the might of his arm, and because of the glory of
+God.
+
+Then, when he was weary, peace came into his heart, and he sighed
+"_Amen_!"
+
+"Amen!" said Oran the monk.
+
+"Amen!" said Keir the monk.
+
+"And this thing has been done," said Colum, "because of your evil wish
+and the brethren, that I should break my fast, and eat of fish, till God
+will it. And lo, I have learned a mystery. Ye shall all witness to it on
+the morrow, which is the Sabbath."
+
+That night the monks wondered much. Only Oran and Keir cursed the fishes
+in the deeps of the sea and the flies in the deeps of the air.
+
+On the morrow, when the sun was yellow on the brown seaweed, and there
+was peace on the isle and upon the waters, Colum and the brotherhood
+went slowly towards the sea.
+
+At the meadows that are close to the sea, the saint stood still. All
+bowed their heads.
+
+"O winged things of the air," cried Colum, "draw near!"
+
+With that the air was full of the hum of innumerous flies, midges, bees,
+wasps, moths, and all winged insects. These settled upon the monks, who
+moved not, but praised God in silence.
+
+"Glory and praise to God," cried Colum, "behold the Sabbath of the
+children of God that inhabit the deeps of the air! Blessing and peace be
+upon them."
+
+"Peace! Peace!" cried the monks, with one voice.
+
+"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" cried Colum
+the White, glad because of the glory to God.
+
+"_An ainn an Athar, 's an Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh_," cried the
+monks, bowing reverently, and Oran and Keir deepest of all, because they
+saw the fly that was of Colum's cell leading the whole host, as though
+it were its captain, and singing to them a marvellous sweet song.
+
+Oran and Keir testified to this thing, and all were full of awe and
+wonder, and Colum praised God.
+
+Then the saints and the brotherhood moved onward and went upon the
+rocks. When all stood ankle-deep in the seaweed that was swaying in the
+tide, Colum cried:
+
+"O finny creatures of the deep, draw near!"
+
+And with that the whole sea shimmered as with silver and gold. All the
+fishes of the sea, and the great eels, and the lobsters and the crabs,
+came in a swift and terrible procession. Great was the glory.
+
+Then Colum cried, "O fishes of the deep, who is your king?" Whereupon
+the herring, the mackerel, and the dogfish swam forward, and each
+claimed to be king. But the echo that ran from wave to wave said, _The
+Herring is King_!
+
+Then Colum said to the mackerel, "Sing the song that is upon you."
+
+And the mackerel sang the song of the wild rovers of the sea, and the
+lust of pleasure.
+
+Then Colum said, "But for God's mercy, I would curse you, O false fish."
+
+Then he spoke likewise to the dogfish, and the dogfish sang of slaughter
+and the chase, and the joy of blood.
+
+And Colum said, "Hell shall be your portion."
+
+Then there was peace. And the herring said:
+
+"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
+
+Whereat all that mighty multitude, before they sank into the deep, waved
+their fins and their claws, each after its kind, and repeated as with
+one voice:
+
+"_An ain ann Athar, 's an Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh!_"
+
+And the glory that was upon the Sound of Iona was as though God trailed
+a starry net upon the waters, with a shining star in every little
+hollow, and a flowing moon of gold on every wave.
+
+Then Colum the White put out both his arms, and blessed the children of
+God that are in the deeps of the sea and that are in the deeps of the
+air.
+
+That is how Sabbath came upon all living things upon Ioua that is
+called Iona, and within the air above Ioua, and within the sea that is
+around Ioua.
+
+And the glory is Colum's.
+
+
+To illustrate the history of the island I select the following episode
+from _Barbaric Tales_. It deals with The Flight of the Culdees. The name
+culdee is somewhat loosely used both by mediæval and modern writers, for
+it does not appear to have been given to the Brotherhood of the Columban
+Church till two hundred years after Columba's death. The word may be
+taken to mean the Cleric of God; perhaps, later, it was the equivalent
+of anchorite. This episode is, in date, about A.D. 800 or soon after.
+
+
+On the wane of the moon, on the day following the ruin of Bail'-tiorail,
+sails were seen far east of Stromness.
+
+Olaus the White called his men together. The boats coming before the
+wind were doubtless his own galleys which he had lost when the
+south-gale had blown them against Skye; but no man can know when and how
+the gods may smile grimly, and let the swords that whirl be broken, or
+the spears that are flat become a hedge of death.
+
+An hour later, a startled word went from viking to viking. The galleys
+in the offing were the fleet of Sweno the Hammerer. Why had he come so
+far southward, and why were oars so swift and the stained sails
+distended before the wind? They were soon to know.
+
+Sweno himself was the first to land. A great man he was, broad and
+burly, with a sword-slash across his face that brought his brows in a
+perpetual frown above his savage blood-shot eyes.
+
+In few words he told how he had met a galley, with only half its crew,
+and of these many who were wounded. It was the last of the fleet of Haco
+the Laugher. A fleet of fifteen war-birlinns had set out from the Long
+Island, and had given battle. Haco had gone into the strife, laughing
+loud as was his wont, and he and all his men had the berserk rage, and
+fought with joy and foam at the mouth. Never had the Sword sung a
+sweeter song.
+
+"Well," said Olaus the White grimly, "well, how did the Raven fly?"
+
+"When Haco laughed for the last time, his sword waving out of the
+death-tide where he sank, there was only one galley left. No more than
+nine vikings lived thereafter to tell the tale. These nine we took out
+of their boat, which was below waves soon. Haco and his men are all
+fighting the sea-shadows by now."
+
+A loud snarling went from man to man. This became a cry of rage. Then
+savage shouts filled the air. Swords were lifted up against the sky; and
+the fierce glitter of blue eyes and the bristling of tawny beards were
+fair to see, thought the captive women, though their hearts beat in
+their breasts like eaglets behind the bars of a cage.
+
+Sweno the Hammerer frowned a deep frown when he heard that Olaus was
+there with only the _Svart-Alf_ out of the galleys which had gone the
+southward way.
+
+"If the islanders come upon us now with their birlinns we shall have to
+make a running fight," he said.
+
+Olaus laughed.
+
+"Ay, but the running shall be after the birlinns, Sweno."
+
+"I hear there are fifty and nine men of these Culdees yonder under the
+sword-priest, Maoliosa?"
+
+"It is a true word. But to-night, after the moon is up, there shall be
+none."
+
+At that, all who heard laughed, and were less heavy in their hearts
+because of the slaying and drowning of Haco the Laugher and all his
+crew.
+
+"Where is the woman Brenda that you took?" Olaus asked, as he stared at
+Sweno's boat and saw no woman there.
+
+"She is in the sea."
+
+Olaus the White looked. It was his eyes that asked.
+
+"I flung her into the sea because she laughed when she heard of how the
+birlinns that were under Somhairle the Renegade drove in upon our ships,
+and how Haco laughed no more, and the sea was red with viking blood."
+
+"She was a woman, Sweno--and none more fair in the isles, after Morna
+that is mine."
+
+"Woman or no woman, I flung her into the sea. The Gael call us Gall:
+then I will let no Gael laugh at the Gall. It is enough. She is drowned.
+There are always women: one here, one there--it is but a wave blown this
+way or that."
+
+At this moment a viking came running across the ruined town with
+tidings. Maoliosa and his culdees were crowding into a great birlinn.
+Perhaps they were coming to give battle: perhaps they were for sailing
+away from that place.
+
+Olaus and Sweno stared across the fjord. At first they knew not what to
+do. If Maoliosa thought of battle he would hardly choose that hour and
+place. Or was it that he knew the Gael were coming in force, and that
+the vikings were caught in a trap?
+
+At last it was clear. Sweno gave a great laugh.
+
+"By the blood of Odin," he cried, "they come to sue for peace!"
+
+Filled with white-robed culdees, the birlinn drew slowly across the
+loch. A tall, old man stood at the prow, with streaming hair and beard,
+white as sea-foam. In his right hand he grasped a great Cross, whereon
+Christ was crucified.
+
+The vikings drew close to one another.
+
+"Hail them in their own tongue, Sweno," said Olaus.
+
+The Hammerer moved to the water-edge, as the birlinn stopped, a short
+arrow-flight away.
+
+"Ho, there, priests of the Christ-faith!"
+
+"What would you, viking?" It was Maoliosa himself that spoke.
+
+"Why do you come here among us, you that are Maoliosa?"
+
+"To win you and yours to God, Pagan."
+
+"Is it madness that is upon you, old man? We have swords and spears
+here, if we lack hymns and prayers."
+
+All this time Olaus kept a wary watch inland and seaward, for he feared
+that Maoliosa came because of an ambush.
+
+Truly the old monk was mad. He had told his culdees that God would
+prevail, and that the pagans would melt away before the Cross. The
+ebb-tide was running swift. Even while Sweno spoke, the birlinn touched
+a low sea-hidden ledge of rock. A cry of consternation went up from the
+white-robes. Loud laughter came from the vikings.
+
+"Arrows!" cried Olaus.
+
+With that threescore men took their bows. A hail of death-shafts fell.
+Many pierced the water, but some pierced the necks and hearts of the
+culdees.
+
+Maoliosa himself, stood in death transfixed to the mast. With a scream
+the monks swept their oars backward. Then they leaped to their feet, and
+changed their place, and rowed for life.
+
+The summer-sailors sprang into their galley. Sweno the Hammerer was at
+the bow. The foam curled and hissed. The birlinn of the culdees grided
+upon the opposite shore at the moment when Sweno brought down his
+battle-axe upon the monk who steered. The man was cleft to the shoulder.
+Sweno swayed with the blow, stumbled, and fell headlong into the sea. A
+culdee thrust at him with an oar, and pinned him among the sea-tangle.
+Thus died Sweno the Hammerer.
+
+Like a flock of sheep the white-robes leaped upon the shore. Yet Olaus
+was quicker than they. With a score of vikings he raced to the Church of
+the Cells, and gained the sanctuary. The monks uttered a cry of despair,
+and, turning, fled across the sands. Olaus counted them. There were now
+forty in all.
+
+"Let forty men follow," he cried.
+
+The monks fled this way and that. Olaus, and those who watched, laughed
+to see how they stumbled, because of their robes. One by one fell,
+sword-cleft or spear-thrust. The sand-dunes were red.
+
+Soon there were fewer than a score--then twelve only--ten!
+
+"Bring them back!" Olaus shouted.
+
+When the ten fugitives were captured and brought back, Olaus took the
+crucifix that Maoliosa had raised, and held it before each in turn.
+
+"Smite!" he said to the first monk. But the man would not.
+
+"Smite!" he said to the second; but he would not. And so it was to the
+tenth.
+
+"Good!" said Olaus the White; "they shall witness to their God."
+
+With that he bade his vikings break up the birlinn, and drive the planks
+into the ground and shore them up with logs. When this was done he
+crucified each culdee. With nails and with ropes he did unto each what
+their God had suffered. Then all were left there by the water-side.
+
+That night, when Olaus the White and the laughing Morna left the great
+bonfire where the vikings sang and drank horn after horn of strong ale,
+they stood and looked across the strait. In the moonlight, upon the dim
+verge of the island shore, they could see ten crosses. On each was a
+motionless white splatch.
+
+
+Once more, for an instance of the grafting of Christian thought and
+imagery on pagan thought and imagery, I take a few pages of the
+introductory part to the story of "The Woman with the Net," in a later
+volume.[6] They tell of a young monk who, inspired by Colum's holy
+example, went out of Iona as a missionary to the Pictish heathen of the
+north.
+
+When Artân had kissed the brow of every white-robed brother on Iona, and
+had been thrice kissed by the aged Colum, his heart was filled with
+gladness.
+
+It was late summer, and in the afternoon-light peace lay on the green
+waters of the Sound, on the green grass of the dunes, on the domed
+wicker-woven cells of the culdees over whom the holy Colum ruled, and on
+the little rock-strewn hill which rose above where stood Colum's wattled
+church of sun-baked mud. The abbot walked slowly by the side of the
+young man. Colum was tall, with hair long and heavy but white as the
+canna, and with a beard that hung low on his breast, grey as the moss on
+old firs. His blue eyes were tender. The youth--for though he was a
+grown man he seemed a youth beside Colum--had beauty. He was tall and
+comely, with yellow curling hair, and dark-blue eyes, and a skin so
+white that it troubled some of the monks who dreamed old dreams and
+washed them away in tears and scourgings.
+
+"You have the bitter fever of youth upon you, Artân," said Colum, as
+they crossed the dunes beyond Dûn-I; "but you have no fear, and you will
+be a flame among these Pictish idolaters, and you will be a lamp to show
+them the way."
+
+"And when I come again, there will be clappings of hands, and hymns,
+and many rejoicings?"
+
+"I do not think you will come again," said Colum. "The wild people of
+these northlands will burn you, or crucify you, or put you upon the
+crahslat, or give you thirst and hunger till you die. It will be a great
+joy for you to die like that, Artân, my son?"
+
+"Ay, a great joy," answered the young monk, but with his eyes dreaming
+away from his words.
+
+Silence was between them as they neared the cove where a large coracle
+lay, with three men in it.
+
+"Will God be coming to Iona when I am away?" asked Artân.
+
+Colum stared at him.
+
+"Is it likely that God would come here in a coracle?" he asked, with
+scornful eyes.
+
+The young man looked abashed. For sure, God would not come in a coracle,
+just as he himself might come. He knew by that how Colum had reproved
+him. He would come in a cloud of fire, and would be seen from far and
+near. Artân wondered if the place he was going to was too far north for
+him to see that greatness; but he feared to ask.
+
+"Give me a new name," he asked; "give me a new name, my father."
+
+"What name will you have?"
+
+"Servant of Mary."
+
+"So be it, Artân Gille-Mhoire."
+
+With that Colum kissed him and bade farewell, and Artân sat down in the
+coracle, and covered his head with his mantle, and wept and prayed.
+
+The last word he heard was, _Peace_!
+
+"That is a good word, and a good thing," he said to himself; "and
+because I am the Servant of Mary, and the Brother of Jesu the Son, I
+will take peace to the _Cruitnè_, who know nothing of that blessing of
+the blessings."
+
+When he unfolded his mantle, he saw that the coracle was already far
+from Iona. The south wind blew, and the tides swept northward, and the
+boat moved swiftly across the water. The sea was ashine with froth and
+small waves leaping like lambs.
+
+In the boat were Thorkeld, a helot of Iona, and two dark wild-eyed men
+of the north. They were Picts, but could speak the tongue of the Gael.
+Myrdu, the Pictish king of Skye, had sent them to Iona, to bring back
+from Colum a culdee who could show wonders.
+
+"And tell the chief Druid of the Godmen," Myrdu had said, "that if his
+culdee does not show me good wonders, and so make me believe in his two
+gods and the woman, I will put an ash-shaft through his body from the
+hips and out at his mouth, and send him back on the north tide to the
+Isle of the White-Robes." The sun was already among the outer isles when
+the coracle passed near the Isle of Columns. A great noise was in the
+air: the noise of the waves in the caverns, and the noise of the tide,
+like sea-wolves growling, and like bulls bellowing in a narrow pass of
+the hills.
+
+A sudden current caught the boat, and it began to drift towards great
+reefs white with ceaseless torn streams.
+
+Thorkeld leaned from the helm, and shouted to the two Picts. They did
+not stir, but sat staring, idle with fear.
+
+Artân knew now that it was as Colum had said. God would give him glory
+soon.
+
+So he took the little clarsach he had for hymns, for he was the best
+harper on Iona, and struck the strings, and sang. But the Latin words
+tangled in his throat, and he knew too that the men in the boat would
+not understand what he sang; also that the older gods still came far
+south, and in the caves of the Isle of Columns were demons. There was
+only one tongue common to all; and since God has wisdom beyond that of
+Colum himself, He would know the song in Gaelic as well as though sung
+in Latin.
+
+So Artân let the wind take his broken hymn, and he made a song of his
+own, and sang:
+
+    O Heavenly Mary, Queen of the Elements,
+    And you, Brigit the fair with the little harp,
+    And all the saints, and all the old gods
+    (And it is not one of them I'd be disowning),
+    Speak to the Father, that he may save us from drowning.
+
+Then seeing that the boat drifted closer, he sang again:
+
+    Save us from the rocks and the sea, Queen of Heaven!
+    And remember that I am a Culdee of Iona,
+    And that Colum has sent me to the _Cruitnè_
+    To sing them the song of peace lest they be damned for ever!
+
+Thorkeld laughed at that.
+
+"Can the woman put swimming upon you?" he said roughly. "I would rather
+have the good fin of a great fish now than any woman in the skies."
+
+"You will burn in hell for that," said Artân, the holy zeal warm at his
+heart.
+
+But Thorkeld answered nothing. His hand was on the helm, his eyes on the
+foaming rocks. Besides, what had he to do with the culdee's hell or
+heaven? When he died, he, who was a man of Lochlann, would go to his own
+place.
+
+One of the dark men stood, holding the mast. His eyes shone. Thick words
+swung from his lips like seaweed thrown out of a hollow by an ebbing
+wave.
+
+The coracle swerved, and the four men were wet with the heavy spray.
+
+Thorkeld put his oar in the water, and the swaying craft righted.
+
+"Glory to God," said Artân.
+
+"There is no glory to your god in this," said Thorkeld scornfully. "Did
+you not hear what Necta sang? He sang to the woman in there that drags
+men into the caves, and throws their bones on the next tide. He put an
+incantation upon her, and she shrank, and the boat slid away from the
+rocks."
+
+"That is a true thing," thought Artân. He wondered if it was because he
+had not sung his hymn in the holy Latin.
+
+When the last flame died out of the west, and the stars came like sheep
+gathering at the call of the shepherd, Artân remembered that he had not
+said his prayers and sang the vesper hymn.
+
+He lay back and listened. There were no bells calling across the water.
+He looked into the depths. It was Manann's kingdom, and he had never
+heard that God was there; but he looked. Then he stared into the
+dark-blue star-strewn sky.
+
+Suddenly he touched Thorkeld.
+
+"Tell me," he said, "how far north has the Cross of Christ come?"
+
+"By the sea way it has not come here yet. Murdoch the Freckled came with
+it this way, but he was pulled into the sea, and he died."
+
+"Who pulled him into the sea?"
+
+Thorkeld stared into the running wave. He had no words.
+
+Artân lay still for a long while.
+
+"It will go ill with me," he thought, "if Mary cannot see me so far away
+from Iona, and if God will not listen to me. Colum should have known
+that, and given me a holy leaf with the fair branching letters on it,
+and the Latin words that are the words of God."
+
+Then he spoke to the man who had sung.
+
+"Do you know of Mary, and God, and the Son, and the Spirit?"
+
+"You have too many Gods, Culdee," answered the Pict sullenly: "for of
+these one is your god's son, and the other is the woman his mother, and
+the third is the ghost of an ancestor."
+
+Artân frowned.
+
+"The curse of the God of Peace upon you for that," he said angrily; "do
+you know that you have hell for your dwelling-place if you speak evil of
+God the Father, and the Son, and the Mother of God?"
+
+"How long have they been in Iona, White-Robe?"
+
+The man spoke scornfully. Artân knew they had not been there many years.
+He had no words.
+
+"My father worshipped the Sun on the Holy Isle before ever your great
+Druid that is called Colum crossed the Moyle. Were your three gods in
+the coracle with Colum? They were not on the Holy Isle when he came."
+
+"They were coming there," answered Artân confusedly. "It is a long, long
+way from--from--from the place they were sailing from."
+
+Necta listened sullenly.
+
+"Let them stay on Iona," he said: "gods though they be, it would fare
+ill with them if they came upon the Woman with the Net." Then he turned
+on his side, and lay by the man Darach, who was staring at the moon and
+muttering words that neither Artân nor Thorkeld knew.
+
+A white calm fell. The boat lay like a leaf on a silent pool. There was
+nothing between that dim wilderness and the vast sweeping blackness
+filled with quivering stars, but the coracle, that a wave could crush.
+
+
+At times, I doubt not, there must have been weaker brethren among these
+simple and devoted Culdees of Iona, though in Colum's own day there was
+probably none (unless it were Oran) who was not the visible outward
+shrine of a pure flame.
+
+Thinking of such an one, and not without furtive pagan sympathy, I wrote
+the other day these lines, which I may also add here as a further
+side-light upon that half-Pagan, half-Christian basis upon which the
+Columban Church of Iona stood.
+
+    Balva the old monk I am called: when I was young, Balva Honeymouth.
+    That was before Colum the White came to Iona in the West.
+    She whom I loved was a woman whom I won out of the South.
+    And I had a good heaven with my lips on hers and with breast to
+      breast.
+
+    Balva the old monk I am called: were it not for the fear
+    That the soul of Colum the White would meet my soul in the Narrows
+    That sever the living and dead, I would rise up from here,
+    And go back to where men pray with spears and arrows.
+
+    Balva the old monk I am called: ugh! ugh! the cold bell of the
+      matins--'tis dawn!
+    Sure it's a dream I have had that I was in a warm wood with the sun
+      ashine,
+    And that against me in the pleasant greenness was a soft fawn,
+    And a voice that whispered "Balva Honeymouth, drink, I am thy wine!"
+
+As I write,[7] here on the hill-slope of Dûn-I, the sound of the furtive
+wave is as the sighing in a shell. I am alone between sea and sky, for
+there is no other on this bouldered height, nothing visible but a single
+blue shadow that slowly sails the hillside. The bleating of lambs and
+ewes, the lowing of kine, these come up from the Machar that lies
+between the west slopes and the shoreless sea to the west; these ascend
+as the very smoke of sound. All round the island there is a continuous
+breathing; deeper and more prolonged on the west, where the open sea
+is; but audible everywhere. The seals on Soa are even now putting their
+breasts against the running tide; for I see a flashing of fins here and
+there in patches at the north end of the Sound, and already from the
+ruddy granite shores of the Ross there is a congregation of
+seafowl--gannets and guillemots, skuas and herring-gulls, the
+long-necked northern diver, the tern, the cormorant. In the sunblaze,
+the waters of the Sound dance their blue bodies and swirl their flashing
+white hair o' foam; and, as I look, they seem to me like children of the
+wind and the sunshine, leaping and running in these flowing pastures,
+with a laughter as sweet against the ears as the voices of children at
+play.
+
+The joy of life vibrates everywhere. Yet the Weaver does not sleep, but
+only dreams. He loves the sun-drowned shadows. They are invisible thus,
+but they are there, in the sunlight itself. Sure, they may be heard: as,
+an hour ago, when on my way hither by the Stairway of the Kings--for so
+sometimes they call here the ancient stones of the mouldered princes of
+long ago--I heard a mother moaning because of the son that had had to go
+over-sea and leave her in her old age; and heard also a child sobbing,
+because of the sorrow of childhood--that sorrow so unfathomable, so
+incommunicable. And yet not a stone's-throw from where I lie, half
+hidden beneath an overhanging rock, is the Pool of Healing. To this
+small, black-brown tarn, pilgrims of every generation, for hundreds of
+years, have come. Solitary, these; not only because the pilgrim to the
+Fount of Eternal Youth must fare hither alone, and at dawn, so as to
+touch the healing water the moment the first sunray quickens it--but
+solitary, also, because those who go in quest of this Fount of Youth are
+the dreamers and the Children of Dream, and these are not many, and few
+come now to this lonely place. Yet, an Isle of Dream Iona is, indeed.
+Here the last sun-worshippers bowed before the Rising of God; here
+Columba and his hymning priests laboured and brooded; and here Oran or
+his kin dreamed beneath the monkish cowl that pagan dream of his. Here,
+too, the eyes of Fionn and Oisìn, and of many another of the heroic men
+and women of the Fiànna, may have lingered; here the Pict and the Celt
+bowed beneath the yoke of the Norse pirate, who, too, left his dreams,
+or rather his strangely beautiful soul-rainbows, as a heritage to the
+stricken; here, for century after century, the Gael has lived, suffered,
+joyed, dreamed his impossible, beautiful dream; as here, now, he still
+lives, still suffers patiently, still dreams, and through all and over
+all, broods upon the incalculable mysteries. He is an elemental, among
+the elemental forces. He knows the voices of wind and sea: and it is
+because the Fount of Youth upon Dûn-I of Iona is not the only wellspring
+of peace, that the Gael can front destiny as he does, and can endure.
+Who knows where its tributaries are? They may be in your heart, or in
+mine, and in a myriad others.
+
+I would that the birds of Angus Òg might, for once, be changed, not, as
+fabled, into the kisses of love, but into doves of peace, that they
+might fly into the green world, and nest there in many hearts, in many
+minds, crooning their incommunicable song of joy and hope.
+
+
+A doomed and passing race. I have been taken to task for these words.
+But they are true, in the deep reality where they obtain. Yes, but true
+only in one sense, however vital that is. The Breton's eyes are slowly
+turning from the enchanted West, and slowly his ears are forgetting the
+whisper of the wind around menhir and dolmen. The Manxman has ever been
+the mere yeoman of the Celtic chivalry; but even his rude dialect
+perishes year by year. In Wales, a great tradition survives; in Ireland,
+a supreme tradition fades through sunset-hued horizons; in Celtic
+Scotland, a passionate regret, a despairing love and longing, narrows
+yearly before a dull and incredibly selfish alienism. The Celt has at
+last reached his horizon. There is no shore beyond. He knows it. This
+has been the burden of his song since Malvina led the blind Oisìn to his
+grave by the sea: "Even the Children of Light must go down into
+darkness." But this apparition of a passing race is no more than the
+fulfilment of a glorious resurrection before our very eyes. For the
+genius of the Celtic race stands out now with averted torch, and the
+light of it is a glory before the eyes, and the flame of it is blown
+into the hearts of the stronger people. The Celt fades, but his spirit
+rises in the heart and the mind of the Anglo-Celtic peoples, with whom
+are the destinies of generations to come.
+
+I stop, and look seaward from this hillslope of Dûn-I. Yes, even in this
+Isle of Joy, as it seems in this dazzle of golden light and splashing
+wave, there is the like mortal gloom and immortal mystery which moved
+the minds of the old seers and bards. Yonder, where that thin spray
+quivers against the thyme-set cliff, is the Spouting Cave, where to this
+day the Mar-Tarbh, dread creature of the sea, swims at the full of the
+tide. Beyond, out of sight behind these craggy steeps, is
+Port-na-Churaich, where, a thousand years ago, Columba landed in his
+coracle. Here, eastward, is the landing-place, for the dead of old,
+brought hence out of Christendom for sacred burial in the Isle of the
+Saints. All the story of the Gael is here. Iona is the microcosm of the
+Gaelic world.
+
+Last night, about the hour of the sun's going, I lay upon the heights
+near the Cave, overlooking the Machar--the sandy, rock-frontiered plain
+of duneland on the west side of Iona, exposed to the Atlantic. There was
+neither bird nor beast, no living thing to see, save one solitary human
+creature. The man toiled at kelp-burning. I watched the smoke till it
+merged into the sea-mist that came creeping swiftly out of the north,
+and down from Dûn-I eastward. At last nothing was visible. The mist
+shrouded everything. I could hear the dull, rhythmic beat of the waves.
+That was all. No sound, nothing visible.
+
+It was, or seemed, a long while before a rapid thud-thud trampled the
+heavy air. Then I heard the rush, the stamping and neighing, of some
+young mares, pasturing there, as they raced to and fro, bewildered or
+perchance in play. A glimpse I caught of three, with flying manes and
+tails; the others were blurred shadows only. A swirl, and the mist
+disclosed them; a swirl, and the mist enfolded them again. Then, silence
+once more.
+
+Abruptly, though not for a long time thereafter, the mist rose and
+drifted seaward.
+
+All was as before. The kelp-burner still stood, straking the smouldering
+seaweed. Above him a column ascended, bluely spiral, dusked with shadow.
+
+
+The kelp-burner: who was he but the Gael of the Isles? Who but the Gael
+in his old-world sorrow? The mist falls and the mist rises. He is there
+all the same, behind it, part of it; and the column of smoke is the
+incense out of his longing heart that desires Heaven and Earth, and is
+dowered only with poverty and pain, hunger and weariness, a little isle
+of the seas, a great hope, and the love of love.
+
+
+But ... to the island-story once more!
+
+Some day, surely, the historian of Iona will appear.
+
+How many "history-books" there are like dead leaves. The simile is a
+travesty. There is no little russet leaf of the forest that could not
+carry more real, more intimate knowledge. There is no leaf that could
+not reveal mystery of form, mystery of colour, wonder of structure,
+secret of growth, the law of harmony; that could not testify to birth,
+and change, and decay, and death; and what history tells us more?--that
+could not, to the inward ear, bring the sound of the south wind making a
+greenness in the woods of Spring, the west wind calling his brown and
+red flocks to the fold.
+
+What a book it will be! It will reveal to us the secret of what Oisìn
+sang, what Merlin knew, what Columba dreamed, what Adamnan hoped: what
+this little "lamp of Christ" was to pagan Europe; what incense of
+testimony it flung upon the winds; what saints and heroes went out of
+it; how the dust of kings and princes were brought there to mingle with
+its sands; how the noble and the ignoble came to it across long seas and
+perilous countries. It will tell, too, how the Danes ravaged the isles
+of the west, and left not only their seed for the strengthening of an
+older race, but imageries and words, words and imageries so alive to-day
+that the listener in the mind may hear the cries of the viking above
+the voice of the Gael and the more ancient tongue of the Pict. It will
+tell, too, how the nettle came to shed her snow above kings' heads, and
+the thistle to wave where bishops' mitres stood; how a simple people out
+of the hills and moors, remembering ancient wisdom or blindly cherishing
+forgotten symbols, sought here the fount of youth; and how, slowly, a
+long sleep fell upon the island, and only the grasses shaken in the
+wind, and the wind itself, and the broken shadows of dreams in the minds
+of the old, held the secret of Iona. And, at the last--with what lift,
+with what joy--it will tell how once more the doves of hope and peace
+have passed over its white sands, this little holy land! This little
+holy land! Ah, white doves, come again! A thousand thousand wait.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] A more polished later version, though attributed to Columba, runs:--
+
+    "An I mo chridhe, I mo ghràidh
+    An àite guth mhanach bidh géum ba;
+    Ach mu'n tig an saoghal gu crich,
+    Bithidh I mar a bha."
+
+(In effect: _In Iona that is my heart's desire, Iona that is my love,
+the lowing of cows shall yet replace the voices of monks: but before the
+end is come Iona shall again be as it was._)
+
+[3] In a beautiful old Scoto-Gaelic ballad, the "Bàs Fhraoich," occurs
+the line, _Thuit i air an tràigh na neul_, "she fell on the shore as a
+mist," though here finely used for a swoon only.
+
+[4] An allusion to the Hebridean proverb, _Ma dh' itheas tu cridh an
+eòin, bidh do chridhe air chrith ri d' bheò_ ("If you eat the bird's
+heart, your heart will palpitate for ever.")
+
+[5] The Irish pipes are called "Piob-theannaich" to distinguish them
+from the "Piob" or "Piob-Mhòr" of the Highlands.
+
+[6] _The Dominion of Dreams_, 1st Ed.
+
+[7] See Notes, p. 429.
+
+
+
+
+BY SUNDOWN SHORES
+
+
+    "_Cette âme qui se lamente
+    En cette plaine dormante
+      C'est la nôtre n'est-ce pas?
+    La mienne, dis, et la tienne,
+    Dont s'exhale l'humble antienne
+      Par ce tiède soir, tout, bas?_"
+
+
+
+
+By Sundown Shores
+
+
+    "_'N hano ann Tad, ar Mab hac ar Spered-Zantel,
+    Homan' zo'r ganaouenn zavet en Breiz-Izel!
+    Zavet gant eur paour-kèz, en Ar-goat, en Ar-vor,
+    Kanet anez-hi, pewienn, hac ho pezo digor._"
+
+    "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
+    This song of mine was raised in my Breton Fatherland,
+    In Argoat forest-clad, in Arvor of the grey wave:
+    Sing it, wayfarers, and all gates will open before you."
+
+I do not know the name of the obscure minstrel who sang this song, as he
+passed from village to village, by the coasts, along the heath-lands of
+Brittany. But there are poets who have no name and no country, because
+they are named by the secret name of the longing of many minds, and
+mysteriously come from and pass to the Land of Heart's Desire, which is
+their own land. This wandering Breton minstrel is of that company. His
+sône is familiar. I have heard it where Connemara breaks in grey rock
+and sudden pastures to the sea: where only the wind and the heather
+people the solitudes of Argyll: where the silent Isles shelve to
+perpetual foam. He speaks for all his brotherhood of Armorica: he speaks
+also for the greater brotherhood of his race, the broken peoples who now
+stand upon the sundown shores, from wild Ushant to the cliffs of Achil,
+from St. Bride's Bay to solitary St. Kilda. He is not only the genius of
+Arvor, daughter of dreams, but the genius of a race whose farewell is in
+a tragic lighting of torches of beauty around its grave. For it is the
+soul of the Celt who wanders homeless to-day, with his pathetic burthen
+that his _sône_ was made by ancestral woods, by the unchanging sea;
+dreaming the enchanted air will open all doors. Alas! few doors open:
+the wayfarer must not tarry. Memories and echoes he may leave, but he
+must turn his face. Grey dolmen and grey menhir already stand there, by
+the last shores, memorials of his destiny.
+
+The ancient Gaels believed that in the western ocean there was an island
+called Hy Bràsil, where all that was beautiful and mysterious lived
+beyond the pillars of the rainbow. The legendary romances of the Celtic
+races may be described as the Hy Bràsil of literature.
+
+In the Celtic commune there are many legendary tales which, but for the
+accident of names and local circumstances, are identical. The familiar
+Highland legend of the children who, bathing in a mountain loch, were
+carried off by a water-horse, has its counterpart in Connemara, in
+Merioneth, and in Finistère, though in the Welsh recital the children
+are the victims of a dragon, and in the Breton legend the monster is a
+boar. For that matter, this elemental tale has its roots in the east,
+and Macedonia and the Himalaya retain the memory of what Aryan wagoners
+told by the camp-fires during their centuries-long immigration into
+Europe. Whether, however, a tale be universal or strictly Celtic,
+generally it has a parallel in one or all of the racial dialects. True,
+there are legendary cycles which are local. The Arzur of Brittany is a
+mere echo in the Hebrides, and the name of Cuculain or the fame of the
+Red Branch has not reached the dunes of Armorica. Nevertheless, even in
+the mythopoeic tales there is a kindred character. Nomënoë may have been
+a Breton Fionn, though he had no Oìsin to wed his deeds to a deathless
+music; and Diarmid and Grainne have loved beneath the oaks of
+Broceliande or the beech-groves of Llanidris, as well as among the hills
+of Erin, or in the rocky fastnesses of Morven. It is characteristic,
+too, how Celtland has given to Celtland. Scotland gave Ireland St.
+Patrick; Ireland gave Scotland St. Columba; the chief bard of Armorica
+came from Wales; and Cornwall has the Arthurian fame which is the meed
+of Kymric Caledonia. To this day no man can say whether Oìsin, old and
+blind, wandered at the last to Drumadoon in Arran, or if indeed he
+followed out of Erin the sweet voice from Tirnan-Òg, and was seen or
+heard of by none, till three centuries later the bells of the clerics
+and the admonitions of Patrick made his days a burden not to be borne.
+Did not the greatest of Irish kings die in tributary lands by the banks
+of the Loire, and who has seen the moss of that lost grave in
+Broceliande where Merlin of the North lay down to a long sleep?
+
+Even where there seems no probability of a common origin, there is often
+a striking similarity in the matter and the manner of folk-tales,
+particularly those which narrate the strange experiences of the saints.
+Thus, for example, in one of the most beautiful of the legendary stories
+given in _The Shadow of Arvor_[8] there is an account of how Gradlon,
+"the honoured chief of Kerne, the monarch who built Ys, and on whose
+brow were united the crowns of Armorica," having voluntarily become a
+wandering beggar, arrived at last in the heart of an ancient forest:
+"towering moss-clad pillars bearing a heavy roof of foliage, full of the
+mystery of a cathedral aisle by night." Here the king vowed to build a
+great temple, but before he could fulfil his vow he died. Gwennole the
+monk had missed Gradlon, and had followed him to the forest, to find him
+there on the morrow, lying on a bed of moss which the fallen leaves had
+flecked with gold. Near him crouched a human figure. This was Primel the
+anchorite. Note how the king speaks to the Christian monk Gwennole
+concerning this ancient hermit. "Have mercy on this poor old man beside
+me: the length of three men's lives has been his, and he has known the
+deeps of sorrow. The sorrows which have come upon me are nothing to his;
+for while I have wept over the fate of my royal city, and while for Ahez
+my heart has been broken, this man has lost his gods. There is no sorrow
+that is so great a sorrow. He is a Druid lamenting a dead faith. Show
+him tenderness." Therewith Gradlon dies. Over the dead king "Gwennole
+murmured a Latin chant; the druid in a tremulous voice intoned a
+refrain in an unknown tongue; and Gradlon, ruler of the sea, slept in
+that glade watched over by the priest of Christ and by the last
+surviving servant of Teutates.... There, amid the majestic solitudes of
+the forest, the two religions of the ancient race joined hands and were
+at one before the mystery of death." Later, the druid bids Gwennole
+build a Christian sanctuary on the spot where "the belated ministrant of
+a fallen faith" died beside Gradlon Maur, the Great King. One strange
+touch of bitterness occurs. "But," exclaims Gwennole, "if the sanctuary
+be reared here, we shall invade thy last refuge." "As for me ...!"
+replies the old man; then, after a silence he adds, with a gesture of
+infinite weariness, "it is my gods who should protect me. Let them save
+me if they can." The dying druid turns away to seek his long rest under
+the sacred oaks: "Gwennole, his heart full of a tender love and pity
+which he could not understand, moved slowly towards the sea." A fitting
+close to a book full of interest, charm, and spiritual beauty.
+
+In the third book of St. Adamnan's _Life of St. Columba_, there is an
+episode entitled "Of a manifestation of angels meeting the soul of one
+Emchath." Columba, "making his way beyond the Ridge of Britain
+(Drum-Alban), near the lake of the river Nisa (Loch Ness), being
+suddenly inspired by the Holy Spirit, says to the brethren who are
+journeying with him at that time: 'Let us make haste to meet the holy
+angels who, that they may carry away the soul of a certain heathen man,
+who is keeping the moral law of nature even to extreme old age, have
+been sent out from the highest regions of heaven, and are waiting until
+we come thither, that we may baptize him in time before he dies.'
+Thereafter the aged saint made as much haste as he could to go in
+advance of his companions, until he came to the district which is named
+Airchartdan (Glen Urquhart)." There he found "the holy heathen man,"
+Emchath by name.
+
+Here, then, is an instance of a Celtic priest in Armorica and of a
+Celtic priest in Scotland acting identically towards an upright heathen.
+A large book would be necessary to relate the correspondence between the
+folk-tales, the traditional romances, and the Christian legends of the
+four great branches of the Celtic race.
+
+On the seventh day, when God rested, says a poet of the Gael, He dreamed
+of the lands and nations he had made, and out of that dreaming were
+born Ireland and Brittany. Truly, within Christian days, there were more
+saints, there were more lamps of the spirit lit in that grey peninsula,
+in that green land, in the little sand-cinctured isle Iona, than
+anywhere betwixt the Syrian deserts and the meads of Glastonbury. It
+takes nothing from, it adds much to these lands where spiritual ecstasy
+has longest dreamed, that the old gods have not perished but merge into
+the brotherhood of Christ's company; that the old faiths, and the
+ancient spirit, and the pagan soul were not given to the wave for foam,
+to the pastures for idle sand. Ireland and Brittany! Behind the
+sorrowful songs of longing and regret, behind the faint chime of bells
+which some day linger as an echo in the towers of Ys where she lies
+under the wave, are the cries of the tympan and the forgotten music of
+druidic harps. What song the oaks knew in Broceliande, what song
+Taliesin heard, what chant Merlin the Wild raised among dim woods in
+Caledon: these may be lost to us for ever, or live only through our
+songs and dreams as shadows live in the hollows of the sunrain: but
+Broceliande and Gethsemane are in symbol akin, Taliesin is but another
+name of him who ate the wild honey and listened to the wind, and
+Merlin, with the nuts of wisdom in his hand, stands hearkening to the
+same deep murmur of the eternal life which was heard upon the Mount of
+Olives.
+
+It has occurred to me often of late, from what I have seen, and read,
+and heard from others, that the Celtic mythopoëic faculty is still
+concerning itself largely with an interweaving of Pagan and Christian
+thought, of Pagan and Christian symbol, of the old Pagan tales of a day
+and of mortal beauty with the Christian symbolic legends that are of no
+day and are of immortal beauty.
+
+A fisherman told me the story of Diarmid and Grainne, in the guise of a
+legend of the Virgin Mary and her Gaelic husband. Three years ago, in
+Appin, an old woman, Jessie Stewart, told me that when Christ was
+crucified He came back to us as Oìsin of the Songs. From a ferryman on
+Loch Linnhe, near the falls of Lora, a friend heard a confused story of
+Oìsin (confused because the narrator at one moment spoke of Oìsin, and
+at another of "Goll"), how on the day that Christ was crucified Oìsin
+slew his own son, and knew madness, crying that he was but a shadow, and
+his son a shadow, and that what he had done was but the shadow of what
+was being done in that hour "to the black sorrow of time and the
+universe (_domhain_)." In this connection, Celtic students will recall
+the story of Concobar mac Nessa, the High King of Ulster: how on that
+day he rose suddenly and fled into the woods and hewed down the branches
+of trees, crying that he slew the multitudes of those who at that moment
+were doing to death the innocent son of a king.
+
+Out of this confusion may arise a new interpretation of certain great
+symbolic persons and incidents in the old mythology. As this legendary
+lore is being swiftly forgotten, it is well that it should be saved to
+new meanings and new beauty, by that mythopoëic faculty which, in the
+Celtic imagination, is as a wing continually uplifting fallen dreams to
+the imaging wind of the Spirit.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[8] _Vide_ Notes, p. 431.
+
+
+
+
+THE WIND, SILENCE, AND LOVE
+
+
+I know one who, asked by a friend desiring more intimate knowledge as to
+what influences above all other influences had shaped her inward life,
+answered at once, with that sudden vision of insight which reveals more
+than the vision of thought, "The Wind, Silence, and Love."
+
+The answer was characteristic, for, with her who made it, the influences
+that shape have always seemed more significant than the things that are
+shapen. None can know for another the mysteries of spiritual
+companionship. What is an abstraction to one is a reality to another:
+what to one has the proved familiar face, to another is illusion.
+
+I can well understand the one of whom I write. With most of us the
+shaping influences are the common sweet influences of motherhood and
+fatherhood, the airs of home, the place and manner of childhood. But
+these are not for all, and may be adverse, and in some degree absent.
+Even when a child is fortunate in love and home, it may be spiritually
+alien from these: it may dimly discern love rather as a mystery dwelling
+in sunlight and moonlight, or in the light that lies on quiet meadows,
+woods, quiet shores: may find a more intimate sound of home in the wind
+whispering in the grass, or when a sighing travels through the
+wilderness of leaves, or when an unseen wave moans in the pine.
+
+When we consider, could any influences be deeper than these three
+elemental powers, for ever young, yet older than age, beautiful
+immortalities that whisper continually against our mortal ear. The Wind,
+Silence, and Love: yes, I think of them as good comrades, nobly
+ministrant, priests of the hidden way.
+
+To go into solitary places, or among trees which await dusk and storm,
+or by a dark shore; to be a nerve there, to listen to, inwardly to hear,
+to be at one with, to be as grass filled with, as reeds shaken by, as a
+wave lifted before, the wind: this is to know what cannot otherwise be
+known; to hear the intimate, dread voice; to listen to what long, long
+ago went away, and to what now is going and coming, coming and going,
+and to what august airs of sorrow and beauty prevail in that dim empire
+of shadow where the falling leaf rests unfallen, where Sound, of all
+else forgotten and forgetting, lives in the pale hyacinth, the
+moon-white pansy, the cloudy amaranth that gathers dew.
+
+And, in the wood; by the grey stone on the hill; where the heron waits;
+where the plover wails: on the pillow; in the room filled with
+flame-warmed twilight; is there any comrade that is as Silence is? Can
+she not whisper the white secrecies which words discolour? Can she not
+say, when we would forget, forget; when we would remember, remember? Is
+it not she also who says, Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy
+laden, and I will give you rest? Is it not she who has a lute into which
+all loveliness of sound has passed, so that when she breathes upon it
+life is audible? Is it not she who will close many doors, and shut away
+cries and tumults, and will lead you to a green garden and a fountain in
+it, and say, "This is your heart, and that is your soul; listen."
+
+That third one, is he a Spirit, alone, uncompanioned? I think sometimes
+that these three are one, and that Silence is his inward voice and the
+Wind the sound of his unwearying feet. Does he not come in wind, whether
+his footfall be on the wild rose, or on the bitter wave, or in the
+tempest shaken with noises and rains that are cries and tears, sighs
+and prayers and tears?
+
+He has many ways, many hopes, many faces. He bends above those who meet
+in twilight, above the cradle, above dwellers by the hearth, above the
+sorrowful, above the joyous children of the sun, above the grave. Must
+he not be divine, who is worshipped of all men? Does not the wild-dove
+take the rainbow upon its breast because of him, and the salmon leave
+the sea for inland pools, and the creeping thing become winged and
+radiant?
+
+The Wind, Silence, and Love: if one cannot learn of these, is there any
+comradeship that can tell us more, that can more comfort us, that can so
+inhabit with living light what is waste and barren?
+
+And, in the hidden hour, one will stoop, and kiss us on the brow, when
+our sudden stillness will, for others, already be memory. And another
+will be as an open road, with morning breaking. And the third will meet
+us, with a light of joy in his eyes; but we shall not see him at first
+because of the sunblaze, or hear his words because in that summer air
+the birds will be multitude.
+
+Meanwhile they are near and intimate. Their life uplifts us. We cannot
+forget wholly, nor cease to dream, nor be left unhoping, nor be without
+rest, nor go darkly without torches and songs, if these accompany us; or
+we them, for they go one way.
+
+
+
+
+BARABAL
+
+A MEMORY
+
+
+I have spoken in "Iona" and elsewhere of the old Highland woman who was
+my nurse. She was not really old, but to me seemed so, and I have always
+so thought of her. She was one of the most beautiful and benignant
+natures I have known.
+
+I owe her a great debt. In a moment, now, I can see her again, with her
+pale face and great dark eyes, stooping over my bed, singing "Wae's me
+for Prince Charlie," or an old Gaelic Lament, or that sad, forgotten,
+beautiful and mournful air that was played at Fotheringay when the Queen
+of Scots was done to death, "lest her cries should be heard." Or, later,
+I can hear her telling me old tales before the fire; or, later still,
+before the glowing peats in her little island-cottage, speaking of men
+and women, and strange legends, and stranger dreams and visions. To her,
+and to an old islander, Seumas Macleod, of whom I have elsewhere spoken
+in this volume, I owe more than to any other influences in my childhood.
+Perhaps it is from her that in part I have my great dislike of towns.
+There is no smoke in the lark's house, to use one of her frequent
+sayings--one common throughout the west.
+
+I never knew any one whose speech, whose thought, was so coloured with
+the old wisdom and old sayings and old poetry of her race. To me she
+stands for the Gaelic woman, strong, steadfast, true to "her own," her
+people, her clan, her love, herself. "When you come to love," she said
+to me once, "keep always to the one you love a mouth of silk and a heart
+of hemp."
+
+Her mind was a storehouse of proverbial lore. Had I been older and
+wiser, I might have learned less fugitively. I cannot attempt to reach
+adequately even the most characteristic of these proverbial sayings; it
+would take overlong. Most of them, of course, would be familiar to our
+proverb-loving people. But, among others of which I have kept note, I
+have not anywhere seen the following in print. "You could always tell
+where his thoughts would be ... pointing one way like the hounds of
+Finn" (_i.e._ the two stars of the north, the Pointers); "It's a
+comfort to know there's nothing missing, as the wren said when she
+counted the stars"; "The dog's howl is the stag's laugh"; and again, "I
+would rather cry with the plover than laugh with the dog" (both meaning
+that the imprisoned comfort of the towns is not to be compared with the
+life of the hills, for all its wildness); "True love is like a
+mountain-tarn; it may not be deep, but that's deep enough that can hold
+the sun, moon, and stars"; "It isn't silence where the lark's song
+ceases"; "St. Bride's Flower, St. Bride's Bird, and St. Bride's Gift
+make a fine spring and a good year." (_Am Beàrnan Bhrigde, 'us
+Gille-Bhrigde, 'us Lunn-Bata Bhrigde, etc.--the dandelion, the
+oyster-catcher, and the cradle_[9]--because the dandelion comes with the
+first south winds and in a sunny spring is seen everywhere, and because
+in a fine season the oyster-catcher's early breeding-note fortells
+prosperity with the nets, and because a birth in spring is good luck for
+child and mother.) "It's easier for most folk to say _Lus Bealtainn_
+than _La' Bealtainn_": i.e. people can see the small things that
+concern themselves better than the great things that concern the world;
+literally, "It's easier to say marigold than may-day"--in Gaelic, a
+close play upon words; "_Cuir do lamh leinn_," "Lend us a hand," as the
+fox in the ditch said to the duckling on the roadside; "_Gu'm a slàn
+gu'n till thu_," "May you return in health," as the young man said when
+his conscience left him; "It's only a hand's-turn from _eunadair_ to
+_eunadan_" (from the bird-snarer to the cage); "Saying _eud_ is next
+door to saying _eudail_," as the girl laughed back to her sweetheart
+(_eud_ is jealousy and _eudail_ my Treasure); "The lark doesn't need
+_broggan_ (shoes) to climb the stairs of the sky."
+
+Among those which will not be new to some readers, I have note of a
+rhyme about the stars of the four seasons, and a saying about the three
+kinds of love, and the four stars of destiny. Wind comes from the spring
+star, runs the first; heat from the summer star, water from the autumn
+star, and frost from the winter star. Barabal's variant was "wind (air)
+from the spring star in the east; fire (heat) from the summer star in
+the south; water from the autumn star in the west; wisdom, silence and
+death from the star in the north." Both this season-rhyme and that of
+the three kinds of love are well known. The latter runs:--
+
+    _Gaol nam fear-dìolain, mar shruth-lìonaidh na mara;
+    Gaol nam fear-fuadain, mar ghaoith tuath 'thig o'n charraig;
+    Gaol nam fear-posda, mar luing a' seòladh gu cala._
+
+    _Lawless love is as the wild tides of the sea;
+    And the roamer's love cruel as the north wind blowing from barren
+      rocks;
+    But wedded love is like the ship coming safe home to haven._
+
+I have found these two and many others of Barabal's sayings and rhymes,
+except those I have first given, in collections of proverbs and
+folklore, but do not remember having noted another, though doubtless
+"The Four Stars of Destiny (or Fate)" will be recalled by some. It ran
+somewhat as follows:--
+
+    _Reul Near_ (Star of the East), Give us kindly birth;
+    _Reul Deas_ (Star of the South), Give us great love;
+    _Reul Niar_ (Star of the West), Give us quiet age;
+    _Reul Tuath_ (Star of the North), Give us Death.
+
+It was from her I first heard of the familiar legend of the waiting of
+Fionn and the Fèinn (popularly now Fingal and the Fingalians),
+"fo-gheasaibh," spellbound, till the day of their return to the living
+world. In effect the several legends are the same. That which Barabal
+told was as an isleswoman would more naturally tell it. A man so pure
+that he could give a woman love and yet let angels fan the flame in his
+heart, and so innocent that his thoughts were white as a child's
+thoughts, and so brave that none could withstand him, climbed once to
+the highest mountain in the Isles, where there is a great cave that no
+one has ever entered. A huge white hound slept at the entrance to the
+cave. He stepped over it, and it did not wake. He entered, and passed
+four tall demons, with bowed heads and folded arms, one with great wings
+of red, another with wings of white, another with wings of green, and
+another with wings of black. They did not uplift their dreadful eyes.
+Then he saw Fionn and the Fèinn sitting in a circle.
+
+Their long hair trailed on the ground; their eyebrows fell to their
+beards; their beards lay upon their feet, so that nothing of their
+bodies was seen but hands like scarped rocks that clasped gigantic
+swords. Behind them hung an elk-horn with a mouth of gold. He blew this
+horn, but nothing happened, except that the huge white hound came in,
+and went to the hollow place round which the Fèinn sat, and in silence
+ate greedily of treasures of precious stones. He blew the horn again,
+and Fionn and all the Fèinn opened their great, cold, grey, lifeless
+eyes, and stared upon him; and for him it was as though he stood at a
+grave and the dead man in the grave put up strong hands and held his
+feet, and as though his soul saw Fear.
+
+But with a mighty effort he blew the horn a third time. The Fèinn leaned
+on their elbows, and Fionn said, "Is the end come?" But the man could
+wait no more, and turned and fled, leaving that ancient mighty company
+leaning upon its elbow, spellbound thus, waiting for the end. So they
+shall be found. The four demons fled into the air, and tumultuous winds
+swung him from that place. He heard the baying of the white hound, and
+the mountain vanished. He was found lying dead in a pasture in the
+little island that was his home. I recall this here because the legend
+was plainly in Barabal's mind when her last ill came upon her. In her
+delirium she cried suddenly, "The Fèinn! The Fèinn! they are coming down
+the hill!"
+
+"I hear the bells of the ewes," she said abruptly, just before the end:
+so by that we knew she was already upon far pastures, and heard the
+Shepherd calling upon the sheep to come into the fold.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[9] It is probably in the isles only that the pretty word _Lunn-Bata_ is
+used for _cr[=a]-all (creathall)_, a cradle. It might best be rendered as
+boat-on-a-billow, _lunn_ being a heaving billow.
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE HERON
+
+
+It was in summer, when there is no night among these Northern Isles. The
+slow, hot days waned through a long after-glow of rose and violet; and
+when the stars came, it was only to reveal purple depths within depths.
+
+Mary Macleod walked, barefoot, through the dewy grass, on the long
+western slope of Innisròn, looking idly at the phantom flake of the moon
+as it hung like a blown moth above the rose-flush of the West. Below it,
+beyond her, the ocean. It was pale, opalescent; here shimmering with the
+hues of the moonbow; here dusked with violet shadow, but, for the most
+part, pale, opalescent. No wind moved, but a breath arose from the
+momentary lips of the sea. The cool sigh floated inland, and made a
+continual faint tremor amid the salt grasses. The skuas and guillemots
+stirred, and at long intervals screamed.
+
+The girl stopped, staring seaward. The illimitable, pale, unlifted wave;
+the hinted dusk of the quiet underwaters; the unfathomable violet gulfs
+overhead;--these silent comrades were not alien to her. Their kin, she
+was but a moving shadow on an isle; to her, they were the veils of
+wonder beyond which the soul knows no death, but looks upon the face of
+Beauty, and upon the eyes of Love, and upon the heart of Peace.
+
+Amid these silent spaces two dark objects caught the girl's gaze. Flying
+eastward, a solander trailed a dusky wing across the sky. So high its
+flight that the first glance saw it as though motionless; yet, even
+while Mary looked, the skyfarer waned suddenly, and that which had been
+was not. The other object had wings too, but was not a bird. A
+fishing-smack lay idly becalmed, her red-brown sail now a patch of warm
+dusk. Mary knew what boat it was--the _Nighean Donn_, out of Fionnaphort
+in Ithona, the westernmost of the Iarraidh Isles.
+
+There was no one visible on board the _Nighean Donn_, but a boy's voice
+sang a monotonous Gaelic cadence, indescribably sweet as it came, remote
+and wild as an air out of a dim forgotten world, across the still
+waters. Mary Macleod knew the song, a strange _iorram_ or boat-song made
+by Pòl the Freckled, and by him given to his friend Angus Macleod of
+Ithona. She muttered the words over and over, as the lilt of the boyish
+voice rose and fell--
+
+    It is not only when the sea is dark and chill and desolate
+      I hear the singing of the queen who lives beneath the ocean:
+    Oft have I heard her chanting voice when moon o'erfloods his golden
+        gate,
+      Or when the moonshine fills the wave with snow-white mazy motion.
+
+    And some day will it hap to me, when the black waves are leaping,
+      Or when within the breathless green I see her shell-strewn door,
+    That singing voice will lure me where my sea-drown'd love lies
+        sleeping
+      Beneath the slow white hands of her who rules the sunken shore.
+
+    For in my heart I hear the bells that ring their fatal beauty.
+      The wild, remote, uncertain bells that chant their lonely sorrow:
+    The lonely bells of sorrow, the bells of fatal beauty,
+      Oft in my heart I hear the bells, who soon shall know no morrow.
+
+The slow splashing of oars in the great hollow cavern underneath her
+feet sent a flush to her face. She knew who was there--that it was the
+little boat of the _Nighean Donn_, and that Angus Macleod was in it.
+
+She stood among the seeding grasses, intent. The cluster of white
+moon-daisies that reached to her knees was not more pale than her white
+face; for a white silence was upon Mary Macleod in her dreaming
+girlhood, as in her later years.
+
+She shivered once as she listened to Angus's echoing song, while he
+secured his boat, and began to climb from ledge to ledge. He too had
+heard the lad Uille Ban singing as he lay upon a coil of rope, while the
+smack lay idly on the unmoving waters; and hearing, had himself taken up
+the song--
+
+    _For in my heart I hear the bells that ring their fatal beauty,
+      The wild, remote, uncertain bells that chant their lonely sorrow:
+    The lonely bells of sorrow, the bells of fatal beauty,
+      Oft in my heart I hear the bells, who soon shall know no morrow._
+
+Mary shivered with the vague fear that had come upon her. Had she not
+dreamed, in the bygone night, that she heard some one in the sea singing
+that very song--some one with slow, white hands which waved idly above a
+dead man? A moment ago she had listened to the same song sung by the lad
+Uille Ban; and now, for the third time, she heard Angus idly chanting
+it as he rose invisibly from ledge to ledge of the great cavern below.
+Three idle songs yet she remembered that death was but the broken
+refrain of an idle song.
+
+When Angus leaped onto the slope and came towards her, she felt her
+pulse quicken. Tall and fair, he looked fairer and taller than she had
+ever seen him. The light that was still in the west lingered in his
+hair, which, yellow as it was, now glistened as with the sheen of
+bronze. He had left his cap in the boat; and as he crossed swiftly
+towards her, she realized anew that he deserved the Gaelic name given
+him by Pòl the poet--Angus the yellow-haired son of Youth. They had
+never spoken of their love, and now both realized in a flash that no
+words were needed. At midsummer noon no one says the sun shines.
+
+Angus came forward with outreaching hands. "Dear, dear love!" he
+whispered. "Mhairi mo rùn, muirnean, mochree!"
+
+She put her hands in his; she put her lips to his; she put her head to
+his breast, and listened, all her life throbbing in response to the
+leaping pulse of the heart that loved her.
+
+"Dear, dear love!" he whispered again.
+
+"Angus!" she murmured.
+
+They said no more, but moved slowly onward, hand in hand.
+
+The night had their secret. For sure, it was in the low sighing of the
+deep when the tide put its whispering lips against the sleeping sea; it
+was in the spellbound silences of the isle; it was in the phantasmal
+light of the stars--the stars of dream, in a sky of dream, in a world of
+dream. When, an hour--or was it an eternity, or a minute?--later, they
+turned, she to her home near the clachan of Innisròn, he to his boat, a
+light air had come up on the forehead of the tide. The sail of the
+_Nighean Donn_ flapped, a dusky wing in the darkness. The penetrating
+smell of sea-mist was in the air.
+
+Mary had only one regret as she turned her face inland, when once the
+invisibly gathering mist hid from her even the blurred semblance of the
+smack--that she had not asked Angus to sing no more that song of Pòl the
+Freckled, which vaguely she feared, and even hated. She had stood
+listening to the splashing of the oars, and, later, to the voices of
+Angus and Uille Ban; and now, coming faintly and to her weirdly through
+the gloom, she heard her lover's voice chanting the words again. What
+made him sing that song, in that hour, on this day of all days?
+
+    For in my heart I hear the bells that ring their fatal beauty,
+      The wild, remote, uncertain bells that chant their lonely sorrow:
+    The lonely bells of sorrow, the bells of fatal beauty,
+      Oft in my heart I hear the bells, who soon shall know no morrow.
+
+But long before she was back at the peat-fire again she forgot that sad,
+haunting cadence, and remembered only his words--the dear words of him
+whom she loved, as he came towards her, across the dewy grass, with
+outstretched hands--
+
+"Dear, dear love!--Mhairi mo rùn, muirnean, mochree!"
+
+She saw them in the leaping shadows in the little room; in the red glow
+that flickered along the fringes of the peats; in the darkness which,
+like a sea, drowned the lonely croft. She heard them in the bubble of
+the meal, as slowly with wooden spurtle she stirred the porridge; she
+heard them in the rising wind that had come in with the tide; she heard
+them in the long resurge and multitudinous shingly inrush as the hands
+of the Atlantic tore at the beaches of Innisròn.
+
+After the smooring of the peats, and when the two old people, the father
+of her father and his white-haired wife, were asleep, she sat for a
+long time in the warm darkness. From a cranny in the peat ash a
+smouldering flame looked out comfortingly. In the girl's heart a great
+peace was come as well as a great joy. She had dwelled so long with
+silence that she knew its eloquent secrets; and it was sweet to sit
+there in the dusk, and listen, and commune with silence, and dream.
+
+Above the long, deliberate rush of the tidal waters round the piled
+beaches she could hear a dull, rhythmic beat. It was the screw of some
+great steamer, churning its way through the darkness; a stranger,
+surely, for she knew the times and seasons of every vessel that came
+near these lonely isles. Sometimes it happened that the Uist or Tiree
+steamers passed that way; doubtless it was the Tiree boat, or possibly
+the big steamer that once or twice in the summer fared northward to
+far-off St. Kilda.
+
+She must have slept, and the sound have passed into her ears as an echo
+into a shell; for when, with a start, she arose, she still heard the
+thud-thud of the screw, although the boat had long since passed away.
+
+It was the cry of a sea-bird which had startled her. Once--twice--the
+scream had whirled about the house. Mary listened, intent. Once more it
+came, and at the same moment she saw a drift of white press up against
+the window.
+
+She sprang to her feet, startled.
+
+"It is the cry of a heron," she muttered, with dry lips; "but who has
+heard tell of a white heron?--and the bird there is white as a
+snow-wreath."
+
+Some uncontrollable impulse made her hesitate. She moved to go to the
+window, to see if the bird were wounded, but she could not. Sobbing with
+inexplicable fear, she turned and fled, and a moment later was in her
+own little room. There all her fear passed. Yet she could not sleep for
+long. If only she could get the sound of that beating screw out of her
+ears, she thought. But she could not, neither waking nor sleeping; nor
+the following day; nor any day thereafter; and when she died, doubtless
+she heard the thud-thud of a screw as it churned the dark waters in a
+night of shrouding mist.
+
+For on the morrow she learned that the _Nighean Donn_ had been run down
+in the mist, a mile south of Ithona, by an unknown steamer. The great
+vessel came out of the darkness, unheeding; unheeding she passed into
+the darkness again. Perhaps the officer in command thought that his
+vessel had run into some floating wreckage; for there was no cry heard,
+and no lights had been seen. Later, only one body was found--that of the
+boy Uille Ban.
+
+When heartbreaking sorrow comes, there is no room for words. Mary
+Macleod said little; what, indeed, was there to say? The islanders gave
+what kindly comfort they could. The old minister, when next he came to
+Innisròn, spoke of the will of God and the Life Eternal.
+
+Mary bowed her head. What had been, was not: could any words, could any
+solace, better that?
+
+"You are young, Mary," said Mr. Macdonald, when he had prayed with her.
+"God will not leave you desolate."
+
+She turned upon him her white face, with her great, brooding, dusky
+eyes:
+
+"Will He give me back Angus?" she said, in her low, still voice, that
+had the hush in it of lonely places.
+
+He could not tell her so.
+
+"It was to be," she said, breaking the long silence that had fallen
+between them.
+
+"Ay," the minister answered.
+
+She looked at him, and then took his hand. "I am thanking you, Mr.
+Macdonald, for the good words you have put upon my sorrow. But I am not
+wishing that any more be said to me. I must go now, for I have to see
+to the milking, an' I hear the poor beasts lowing on the hillside. The
+old folk too are weary, and I must be getting them their porridge."
+
+After that no one ever heard Mary Macleod speak of Angus. She was a good
+lass, all agreed, and made no moan; and there was no croft tidier than
+Scaur-a-van, and because of her it was; and she made butter better than
+any on Innisròn; and in the isles there was no cheese like the
+Scaur-a-van cheese.
+
+Had there been any kith or kin of Angus, she would have made them hers.
+She took the consumptive mother of Uille Ban from Ithona, and kept her
+safe-havened at Scaur-a-van, till the woman sat up one night in her bed,
+and cried in a loud voice that Uille Ban was standing by her side and
+playing a wild air on the strings of her heart, which he had in his
+hands, and the strings were breaking, she cried. They broke, and Mary
+envied her, and the whispering joy she would be having with Uille Ban.
+But Angus had no near kin. Perhaps, she thought, he would miss her the
+more where he had gone. He had a friend, whom she had never seen. He was
+a man of Iona, and was named Eachain MacEachain Maclean. He and Angus
+had been boys in the same boat, and sailed thrice to Iceland together,
+and once to Peterhead, that maybe was as far or further, or perhaps upon
+the coast-lands further east. Mary knew little geography, though she
+could steer by the stars. To this friend she wrote, through the
+minister, to say that if ever he was in trouble he was to come to her.
+
+It was on the third night after the sinking of the _Nighean Donn_ that
+Mary walked alone, beyond the shingle beaches, and where the ledges of
+trap run darkly into deep water. It was a still night and clear. The
+lambs and ewes were restless in the moonshine; their bleating filled the
+upper solitudes. A shoal of mackerel made a spluttering splashing sound
+beyond the skerries outside the haven. The ebb, sucking at the weedy
+extremes of the ledges, caused a continuous bubbling sound. There was no
+stir of air, only a breath upon the sea; but, immeasurably remote,
+frayed clouds, like trailed nets in yellow gulfs of moonlight, shot
+flame-shaped tongues into the dark, and seemed to lick the stars as
+these shook in the wind. "No mist to-night," Mary muttered; then,
+startled by her own words, repeated, and again repeated, "There will be
+no mist to-night."
+
+Then she stood as though become stone. Before her, on a solitary rock, a
+great bird sat. It was a heron. In the moonshine its plumage glistened
+white as foam of the sea; white as one of her lambs it was.
+
+She had never seen, never heard of, a white heron. There was some old
+Gaelic song--what was it?--no, she could not remember--something about
+the souls of the dead. The words would not come.
+
+Slowly she advanced. The heron did not stir. Suddenly she fell upon her
+knees, and reached out her arms, and her hair fell about her shoulders,
+and her heart beat against her throat, and the grave gave up its sorrow,
+and she cried--
+
+"Oh, Angus, Angus, my beloved! Angus, Angus, my dear, dear love!"
+
+She heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing, knew nothing, till, numbed
+and weak, she stirred with a cry, for some creeping thing of the sea had
+crossed her hand. She rose and stared about her. There was nothing to
+give her fear. The moon rays danced on a glimmering sea-pasture far out
+upon the water; their lances and javelins flashed and glinted merrily. A
+dog barked as she crossed the flag-stones at Scaur-a-van, then suddenly
+began a strange furtive baying. She called, "Luath! Luath!"
+
+The dog was silent a moment, then threw its head back and howled,
+abruptly breaking again into a sustained baying. The echo swept from
+croft to croft, and wakened every dog upon the isle.
+
+Mary looked back. Slowly circling behind her she saw the white heron.
+With a cry, she fled into the house.
+
+For three nights thereafter she saw the white heron. On the third she
+had no fear. She followed the foam-white bird; and when she could not
+see it, then she followed its wild, plaintive cry. At dawn she was still
+at Ardfeulan, on the western side of Innisròn; but her arms were round
+the drowned heart whose pulse she had heard leap so swift in joy, and
+her lips put a vain warmth against the dear face that was wan as spent
+foam, and as chill as that.
+
+Three years after that day Mary saw again the white heron. She was alone
+now, and she was glad, for she thought Angus had come, and she was
+ready.
+
+Yet neither death nor sorrow happened. Thrice, night after night, she
+saw the white gleam of nocturnal wings, heard the strange bewildering
+cry.
+
+It was on the fourth day, when a fierce gale covered the isle with a
+mist of driving spray. No Innisròn boat was outside the haven; for that,
+all were glad. But in the late afternoon a cry went from mouth to mouth.
+
+There was a fishing-coble on the skerries! That meant death for all on
+board, for nothing could be done. The moment came soon. A vast drowning
+billow leaped forward, and when the cloud of spray had scattered, there
+was no coble to be seen. Only one man was washed ashore, nigh dead, upon
+the spar he clung to. His name was Eachain MacEachain, son of a Maclean
+of Iona.
+
+And that was how Mary Macleod met the friend of Angus, and he a ruined
+man, and how she put her life to his, and they were made one.
+
+Her man ... yes, he was her man, to whom she was loyal and true, and
+whom she loved right well for many years. But she knew, and he too knew
+well, that she had wedded one man in her heart, and that no other could
+take his place there, then or for ever. She had one husband only, but it
+was not he to whom she was wed, but Angus, the son of Alasdair--him whom
+she loved with the deep love that surpasseth all wisdom of the world
+that ever was, or is, or shall be.
+
+And Eachain her man lived out his years with her, and was content,
+though he knew that in her silent heart his wife, who loved him well,
+had only one lover, one dream, one hope, one passion, one remembrance,
+one husband.
+
+
+
+
+THE SMOOTHING OF THE HAND
+
+
+Glad am I that wherever and whenever I listen intently I can hear the
+looms of Nature weaving Beauty and Music. But some of the most beautiful
+things are learned otherwise--by hazard, in the Way of Pain, or at the
+Gate of Sorrow.
+
+I learned two things on the day when I saw Seumas McIan dead upon the
+heather. He of whom I speak was the son of Ian McIan Alltnalee, but was
+known throughout the home straths and the countries beyond as Seumas
+Dhu, Black James, or, to render the subtler meaning implied in this
+instance, James the Dark One. I had wondered occasionally at the
+designation, because Seumas, if not exactly fair, was not dark. But the
+name was given to him, as I learned later, because, as commonly
+rumoured, he knew that which he should not have known.
+
+I had been spending some weeks with Alasdair McIan and his wife Silis
+(who was my foster-sister), at their farm of Ardoch, high in a remote
+hill country. One night we were sitting before the peats, listening to
+the wind crying amid the corries, though, ominously as it seemed to us,
+there was not a breath in the rowan-tree that grew in the sun's way by
+the house. Silis had been singing, but silence had come upon us. In the
+warm glow from the fire we saw each other's faces. There the silence
+lay, strangely still and beautiful, as snow in moonlight. Silis's song
+was one of the _Dana Spioradail_, known in Gaelic as the Hymn of the
+Looms. I cannot recall it, nor have I ever heard or in any way
+encountered it again.
+
+It had a lovely refrain, I know not whether its own or added by Silis. I
+have heard her chant it to other runes and songs. Now, when too late, my
+regret is deep that I did not take from her lips more of those
+sorrowful, strange songs or chants, with their ancient Celtic melodies,
+so full of haunting sweet melancholy, which she loved so well. It was
+with this refrain that, after a long stillness, she startled us that
+October night. I remember the sudden light in the eyes of Alasdair
+McIan, and the beat at my heart, when, like rain in a wood, her voice
+fell unawares upon us out of the silence:
+
+    _Oh! oh! ohrone, arone! Oh! oh! mo ghraidh, mo chridhe!
+    Oh! oh! mo ghraidh, mo chridhe!_[10]
+
+The wail, and the sudden break in the second line, had always upon me an
+effect of inexpressible pathos. Often that sad wind-song has been in my
+ears, when I have been thinking of many things that are passed and are
+passing.
+
+I know not what made Silis so abruptly begin to sing, and with that
+wailing couplet only, or why she lapsed at once into silence again.
+Indeed, my remembrance of the incident at all is due to the circumstance
+that shortly after Silis had turned her face to the peats again, a knock
+came to the door, and then Seumas Dhu entered.
+
+"Why do you sing that lament, Silis, sister of my father?" he asked,
+after he had seated himself beside me, and spread his thin hands against
+the peat glow, so that the flame seemed to enter within the flesh.
+
+Silis turned to her nephew, and looked at him, as I thought,
+questioningly. But she did not speak. He, too, said nothing more, either
+forgetful of his question, or content with what he had learned or
+failed to learn through her silence.
+
+The wind had come down from the corries before Seumas rose to go. He
+said he was not returning to Alltnalee, but was going upon the hill, for
+a big herd of deer had come over the ridge of Mel Mòr. Seumas, though
+skilled in all hill and forest craft, was not a sure shot, as was his
+kinsman and my host, Alasdair McIan.
+
+"You will need help," I remember Alasdair Ardoch saying mockingly,
+adding, "_Co dhiubh is fhearr let mise thoir sealladh na fàileadh
+dhiubh?_"--that is to say, Whether would you rather me to deprive them
+of sight or smell?
+
+This is a familiar saying among the old sportsmen in my country, where
+it is believed that a few favoured individuals have the power to deprive
+deer of either sight or smell, as the occasion suggests.
+
+"_Dhuit ciàr nan carn!_--The gloom of the rocks be upon you!" replied
+Seumas, sullenly: "mayhap the hour is come when the red stag will sniff
+at my nostrils."
+
+With that dark saying he went. None of us saw him again alive.
+
+Was it a forewarning? I have often wondered. Or had he sight of the
+shadow?
+
+It was three days after this, and shortly after sunrise, that, on
+crossing the south slope of Mel Mòr with Alasdair Ardoch, we came
+suddenly upon the body of Seumas, half submerged in a purple billow of
+heather. It did not, at the moment, occur to me that he was dead. I had
+not known that his prolonged absence had been noted, or that he had been
+searched for. As a matter of fact, he must have died immediately before
+our approach, for his limbs were still loose, and he lay as a sleeper
+lies.
+
+Alasdair kneeled and raised his kinsman's head. When it lay upon the
+purple tussock, the warmth and glow from the sunlit ling gave a fugitive
+deceptive light to the pale face. I know not whether the sun can have
+any chemic action upon the dead. But it seemed to me that a dream rose
+to the face of Seumas, like one of those submarine flowers that are said
+to rise at times and be visible for a moment in the hollow of a wave.
+The dream, the light, waned; and there was a great stillness and white
+peace where the trouble had been. "It is the Smoothing of the Hand,"
+said Alasdair McIan, in a hushed voice.
+
+Often I had heard this lovely phrase in the Western Isles, but always as
+applied to sleep. When a fretful child suddenly falls into quietude and
+deep slumber, an isleswoman will say that it is because of the Smoothing
+of the Hand. It is always a profound sleep, and there are some who hold
+it almost as a sacred thing, and never to be disturbed.
+
+So, thinking only of this, I whispered to my friend to come away; that
+Seumas was dead weary with hunting upon the hills; that he would awake
+in due time.
+
+McIan looked at me, hesitated, and said nothing. I saw him glance
+around. A few yards away, beside a great boulder in the heather, a small
+rowan stood, flickering its feather-like shadows across the white wool
+of a ewe resting underneath. He moved thitherward, slowly, plucked a
+branch heavy with scarlet berries, and then, having returned, laid it
+across the breast of his kinsman.
+
+I knew now what was that passing of the trouble in the face of Seumas
+Dhu, what that sudden light was, that calming of the sea, that ineffable
+quietude. It was the Smoothing of the Hand.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[10] Pronounce mogh-r[=a]y, mogh-r[=e]e (my heart's delight--_lit._ my dear
+one, my heart).
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE FEVER
+
+
+One night, before the peats, I was told this thing by old Cairstine
+Macdonald, in the isle of Benbecula. It is in her words that I give it:
+
+
+In the spring of the year that my boy Tormaid died, the moon-daisies
+were as thick as a woven shroud over the place where Giorsal, the
+daughter of Ian, the son of Ian MacLeod of Baille 'n Bad-a-sgailich,
+slept night and day.[11]
+
+All that March the cormorants screamed, famished. There were few fish in
+the sea, and no kelp-weed was washed up by the high tides. In the island
+and in the near isles, ay, and far north through the mainland, the
+blight lay. Many sickened. I knew young mothers who had no milk. There
+are green mounds in Carnan kirkyard that will be telling you of what
+this meant. Here and there are little green mounds, each so small that
+you might cuddle it in your arm under your plaid.
+
+Tormaid sickened. A bad day was that for him when he came home, weary
+with the sea, and drenched to the skin, because of a gale that caught
+him and his mates off Barra Head. When the March winds tore down the
+Minch, and leaped out from over the Cuchullins, and came west, and lay
+against our homes, where the peats were sodden and there was little
+food, the minister told me that my lad would be in the quiet havens
+before long. This was because of the white fever. It was of that same
+that Giorsal waned, and went out like a thin flame in sunlight.
+
+The son of my man (years ago weary no more) said little ever. He ate
+nothing almost, even of the next to nothing we had. At nights he couldna
+sleep because of his cough. The coming of May lifted him awhile. I hoped
+he would see the autumn; and that if he did, and the herring came, and
+the harvest was had, and what wi' this and what wi' that, he would
+forget his Giorsal that lay i' the mools in the quiet place yonder.
+Maybe then, I thought, the sorrow would go, and take its shadow with
+it.
+
+One gloaming he came in with all the whiteness of his wasted body in his
+face. His heart was out of its shell; and mine, too, at the sight of
+him.[12]
+
+This was the season of the hanging of the dog's mouth.
+
+"What is it, Tormaid-a-ghaolach?" I asked, with the sob that was in my
+throat.
+
+"_Thraisg mo chridhe_," he muttered (My heart is parched). Then, feeling
+the asking in my eyes, he said, "I have seen her."
+
+I knew he meant Giorsal. My heart sank. But I wore my nails into the
+palms of my hands. Then I said this thing, that is an old saying in the
+isles: "Those who are in the quiet havens hear neither the wind nor the
+sea." He was so weak he could not lie down in the bed. He was in the big
+chair before the peats, with his feet on a _claar_.
+
+When the wind was still I read him the Word. A little warm milk was all
+he would take. I could hear the blood in his lungs sobbing like the
+ebb-tide in the sea-weed. This was the thing that he said to me:
+
+"She came to me, like a grey mist, beyond the dyke of the green place,
+near the road. The face of her was grey as a grey dawn, but the voice
+was hers, though I heard it under a wave, so dull and far was it. And
+these are her words to me, and mine to her--and the first speaking was
+mine, for the silence wore me:
+
+    Am bheil thu' falbh,
+      O mo ghraidh?
+        _B'idh mi falbh,
+          Mùirnean!_
+
+    C'uin a thilleas tu,
+      O mo ghraidh?
+      _Cha till mi an rathad so;
+      Tha an't ait e cumhann--
+        O Mùirnean, Mùirnean!
+      B'idh mi falbh an drùgh
+      Am tigh Pharais,
+        Mùirnean!_
+
+    Sèol dhomh an rathad,
+      Mo ghraidh!
+        _Thig an so, Mùirnean-mo,
+          Thig an so!_
+
+    Are you going,
+      My dear one?
+        _Yea, now I am going,
+          Dearest._
+
+    When will you come again,
+      My dear one?
+      _I will not return this way;
+      The place is narrow--
+        O my Darling!
+      I will be going to Paradise,
+        Dear, my dear one!_
+
+    Show me the way,
+      Heart of my heart!
+        _Come hither, dearest, come hither,
+          Come with me!_
+
+"And then I saw that it was a mist, and that I was alone. But now this
+night it is that I feel the breath on the soles of my feet."
+
+And with that I knew there was no hope. "_Ma tha sin an dàn!_ ... if
+that be ordained," was all that rose to my lips. It was that night he
+died. I fell asleep in the second hour. When I woke in the grey dawn,
+his face was greyer than that, and more cold.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] _Baille 'n Bad-a-sgailich_: the Farm of the Shadowy Clump of Trees.
+_Cairstine_, or _Cairistine_, is the Gaelic for _Christina_ (for
+_Christian_), as _Tormaid_ is for Norman, and _Giorsal_ for Grace. "The
+quiet havens" is the beautiful island phrase for graves. Here, also, a
+swift and fatal consumption that falls upon the doomed is called "The
+White Fever." By "the mainland," Harris and the Lewis are meant.
+
+[12] _A cockall a' chridhe_: his heart out of its shell--a phrase often
+used to express sudden derangement from any shock. The ensuing phrase
+means the month from the 15th of July to the 15th of August, _Mios
+crochaidh nan con_, so called as it is supposed to be the hottest, if
+not the most waterless, month in the isles. The word _claar_, used
+below, is the name given a small wooden tub, into which the potatoes are
+turned when boiled.
+
+
+
+
+THE SEA-MADNESS
+
+
+I know a man who keeps a little store in a village by one of the lochs
+of Argyll. He is about fifty, is insignificant, commonplace, in his
+interests parochial, and on Sundays painful to see in his sleek
+respectability. He lives within sight of the green and grey waters,
+above which grey mountains stand; across the kyle is a fair wilderness;
+but to my knowledge he never for pleasure goes upon the hills, nor
+stands by the shore, unless it be of a Saturday night to watch the
+herring-boats come in, or on a Sabbath afternoon when he has word with a
+friend.
+
+Yet this man is one of the strangest men I have met or am like to meet.
+From himself I have never heard word but the commonest, and that in a
+manner somewhat servile. I know his one intimate friend, however. At
+intervals (sometimes of two or three years, latterly each year for three
+years in succession) this village chandler forgets, and is suddenly
+become what he was, or what some ancestor was, in unremembered days.
+
+For a day or two he is listless, in a still sadness; speaking, when he
+has to speak, in a low voice; and often looking about him with sidelong
+eyes. Then one day he will leave his counter and go to the shed behind
+his shop, and stand for a time frowning and whispering, or perhaps
+staring idly, and then go bareheaded up the hillside, and along tangled
+ways of bog and heather, and be seen no more for weeks.
+
+He goes down through the Wilderness locally called The Broken Rocks.
+When he is there, he is a strong man, leaping like a goat--swift and
+furtive. At times he strips himself bare, and sits on a rock staring at
+the sun. Oftenest he walks along the shore, or goes stumbling among
+weedy boulders, calling loudly upon the sea. His friend, of whom I have
+spoken, told me that he had again and again seen Anndra stoop and lift
+handfuls out of the running wave and throw the water above his head
+while he screamed or shouted strange Gaelic words, some incoherent, some
+old as the grey rocks. Once he was seen striding into the sea, batting
+it with his hands, smiting the tide-swell, and defying it and deriding
+it, with stifled laughters that gave way to cries and sobs of broken
+hate and love.
+
+He sang songs to it. He threw bracken, and branches, and stones at it,
+cursing: then falling on his knees would pray, and lift the water to his
+lips, and put it on his head. He loved the sea as a man loves a woman.
+It was his light o' love: his love: his God. Than that desire of his I
+have not heard of any more terrible. To love the wind and the salt wave,
+and be for ever mocked of the one and baffled of the other; to lift a
+heart of flame, and have the bleak air quench it; to stoop, whispering,
+and kiss the wave, and have its saltness sting the lips and blind the
+eyes: this indeed is to know that bitter thing of which so many have
+died after tears, broken hearts, and madness.
+
+His friend, whom I will call Neil, once came upon him when he was in
+dread. Neil was in a boat, and had sailed close inshore on the flow.
+Anndra saw him, and screamed.
+
+"I know who you are! Keep away!" he cried. "_Fear faire na h'aon
+sùla_--I know you for the One-Eyed Watcher!"
+
+"Then," said Neil, "the salt wave went out of his eyes and he knew me,
+and fell on his knees, and wept, and said he was dying of an old broken
+love. And with that he ran down to the shore, and lifted a palmful of
+water to his lips, so that for a moment foam hung upon his tangled
+beard, and called out to his love, and was sore bitter upon her, and
+then up and laughed and scrambled out of sight, though I heard him
+crying among the rocks."
+
+I asked Neil who the One-Eyed Watcher was. He said he was a man who had
+never died and never lived. He had only one eye, but that could see
+through anything except grey granite, the grey crow's egg, and the grey
+wave that swims at the bottom. He could see the dead in the water, and
+watched for them: he could see those on the land who came down near the
+sea, if they had death on them. On these he had no pity. But he was
+unseen except at dusk and in the grey dawn. He came out of a grave. He
+was not a man, but he lived upon the deaths of men. It was worse to be
+alive, and see him, than to be dead and at his feet.
+
+When the man Anndra's madness went away from him--sometimes in a week or
+two weeks, sometimes not for three weeks or more--he would come back
+across the hill. In the dark he would slip down through the bracken and
+bog-myrtle, and wait a while among the ragged fuchsias at the dyke of
+his potato-patch. Then he would creep in at the window of his room, or
+perhaps lift the door-latch and go quietly to his bed. Once Neil was
+there when he returned. Neil was speaking to Anndra's sister, who kept
+house for the poor man. They heard a noise, and the sudden flurried
+clucking of hens.
+
+"It's Anndra," said the woman, with a catch in her throat; and they sat
+in silence, till the door opened. He had been away five weeks, and hair
+and beard were matted, and his face was death-white; but he had already
+slipped into his habitual clothes, and looked the quiet respectable man
+he was. The two who were waiting for him did not speak.
+
+"It's a fine night," he said; "it's a fine night, an' no wind.--Marget,
+it's time we had in mair o' thae round cheeses fra Inverary."
+
+
+
+
+EARTH, FIRE, AND WATER
+
+
+In "The Sea-Madness" I have told of a man--a quiet dull man, a chandler
+of a little Argyll loch-town--who, at times, left his counter, and small
+canny ways, and went out into a rocky wilderness, and became mad with
+the sea. I have heard of many afflicted in some such wise, and have
+known one or two.
+
+In a tale written a few years ago, "The Ninth Wave," I wrote of one whom
+I knew, one Ivor MacNeill, or "Carminish," so called because of his farm
+between the hills Strondeval and Rondeval, near the Obb of Harris in the
+Outer Hebrides. This man heard the secret calling of the ninth wave.
+None may hear that, when there is no wave on the sea, or when perhaps he
+is inland, and not follow. That following is always to the ending of all
+following. For a long while Carminish put his fate from him. He went to
+other isles: wherever he went he heard the call of the sea. "Come," it
+cried, "come, come away!" He passed at last to a kinsman's croft on
+Aird-Vanish in the island of Taransay. He was not free there. He
+stopped at a place where he had no kin, and no memories, and at a
+hidden, quiet farm. This was at Eilean Mhealastaidh, which is under the
+morning shadow of Griomabhal on the mainland. His nights there were a
+sleepless dread. He went to other places. The sea called. He went at
+last to his cousin Eachainn MacEachainn's bothy, near Callernish in the
+Lews, where the Druid Stones stand by the shore and hear nothing for
+ever but the noise of the waves and the cry of the sea-wind. There,
+weary in hope, he found peace at last. He slept, and none called upon
+him. He began to smile, and to hope.
+
+One night the two were at the porridge, and Eachainn was muttering his
+_Bui 'cheas dha 'n Ti_, the Thanks to the Being, when Carminish leaped
+to his feet, and with a white face stood shaking like a rope in the
+wind.
+
+In the grey dawn they found his body, stiff and salt with the ooze.
+
+I did not know, but I have heard of another who had a light tragic end.
+Some say he was witless. Others, that he had the Friday-Fate upon him. I
+do not know what evil he had done, but "some one" had met him and said
+to him "_Bidh ruith na h'Aoin' ort am_ _Feasda_," "The Friday-Fate will
+follow you for ever." So it was said. But I was told this of him: that
+he had been well and strong and happy, and did not know he had a
+terrible gift, that some have who are born by the sea. It is not well to
+be born on a Friday night, within sound of the sea; or on certain days.
+This gift is the "_Eòlas na h'Aoine_," the Friday-Spell. He who has this
+gift must not look upon any other while bathing: if he does, that
+swimmer must drown. This man, whom I will call Finlay, had this eòlas.
+Three times the evil happened. But the third time he knew what he did:
+the man who swam in the sunlight loved the same woman as Finlay loved;
+so he stood on the shore, and looked, and laughed. When the body was
+brought home, the woman struck Finlay in the face. He grew strange after
+a time, and at last witless. A year later it was a cold February. Finlay
+went to and fro singing an old February rhyme beginning:
+
+    _Feadag, Feadag, mathair Faoillich fhuair!_
+
+(Plover, plover, Mother of the bleak Month). He was watching a man
+ploughing. Suddenly he threw down his cromak. He leaped over a dyke, and
+ran to the shore, calling, "I'm coming! I'm coming! Don't pull me--I'm
+coming!" He fell upon the rocks, which had a blue bloom on them like
+fruit, for they were covered with mussels; and he was torn, so that his
+hands and face were streaming red. "I am your red, red love," he cried,
+"sweetheart, my love"; and with that he threw himself into the sea.
+
+More often the sea-call is not a madness, but an inward voice. I have
+been told of a man who was a farmer in Carrick of Ayr. He left wife and
+home because of the calling of the sea. But when he was again in the far
+isles, where he had lived formerly, he was well once more. Another man
+heard the sobbing of the tide among seaweed whenever he dug in his
+garden: and gave up all, and even the woman he loved, and left. She won
+him back, by her love; but on the night before their marriage, in that
+inland place where her farm was, he slipt away and was not seen again.
+Again, there was the man of whom I have spoken in "Iona," who went to
+the mainland, but could not see to plough because the brown fallows
+became waves that splashed noisily about him: and how he went to Canada
+and got work in a great warehouse, but among the bales of merchandise
+heard continually the singular note of the sandpiper, while every hour
+the sea-fowl confused him with their crying.
+
+I have myself in lesser degree, known this irresistible longing. I am
+not fond of towns, but some years ago I had to spend a winter in a great
+city. It was all-important to me not to leave during January; and in one
+way I was not ill-pleased, for it was a wild winter. But one night I
+woke, hearing a rushing sound in the street--the sound of water. I would
+have thought no more of it, had I not recognised the troubled noise of
+the tide, and the sucking and lapsing of the flow in weedy hollows. I
+rose and looked out. It was moonlight, and there was no water. When,
+after sleepless hours, I rose in the grey morning I heard the splash of
+waves. All that day and the next I heard the continual noise of waves. I
+could not write or read; at last I could not rest. On the afternoon of
+the third day the waves dashed up against the house. I said what I could
+to my friends, and left by the night train. In the morning we (for a
+kinswoman was with me) stood on Greenock Pier waiting for the Hebridean
+steamer, the _Clansman_, and before long were landed on an island,
+almost the nearest we could reach, and one that I loved well. We had to
+be landed some miles from the place I wanted to go to, and it was a
+long and cold journey. The innumerable little waterfalls hung in icicles
+among the mosses, ferns, and white birches on the roadsides. Before we
+reached our destination, we saw a wonderful sight. From three great
+mountains, their flanks flushed with faint rose, their peaks, white and
+solemn, vast columns of white smoke ascended. It was as though volcanic
+fires had once again broken their long stillness. Then we saw what it
+was: the north wind (unheard, unfelt, where we stood) blew a hurricane
+against the other side of the peaks, and, striking upon the leagues of
+hard snow, drove it upward like smoke, till the columns rose gigantic
+and hung between the silence of the white peaks and the silence of the
+stars.
+
+That night, with the sea breaking less than a score yards from where I
+lay, I slept, though for three nights I had not been able to sleep. When
+I woke, my trouble was gone.
+
+It was but a reminder to me. But to others it was more than that.
+
+I remember that winter for another thing, which I may write of here.
+
+From the fisherman's wife with whom I lodged I learned that her daughter
+had recently borne a son, but was now up and about again, though for
+the first time, that morning. We went to her, about noon. She was not in
+the house. A small cabbage-garden lay behind, and beyond it the mossy
+edge of a wood of rowans and birches broke steeply in bracken and
+loneroid. The girl was there, and had taken the child from her breast,
+and kneeling, was touching the earth with the small lint-white head.
+
+I asked her what she was doing. She said it was the right thing to do;
+that as soon as possible after the child was born, the mother should
+take it--and best, at noon, and facing the sun--and touch its brow to
+the earth. My friends (like many islanders of the Inner Hebrides, they
+had no Gaelic) used an unfamiliar phrase; "It's the old Mothering." It
+was, in truth, the sacrament of Our Mother, but in a far ancient sense.
+I do not doubt the rite is among the most primitive of those practised
+by the Celtic peoples.
+
+I have not seen it elsewhere, though I have heard of it. Probably it is
+often practised yet in remote places. Even where we were, the women were
+somewhat fearful lest "the minister" heard of what the young mother had
+done. They do not love these beautiful symbolic actions, these
+"ministers," to whom they are superstitions. This old, pagan,
+sacramental earth-rite is, certainly, beautiful. How could one better be
+blessed, on coming into life, than to have the kiss of that ancient
+Mother of whom we are all children? There must be wisdom in that first
+touch. I do not doubt that behind the symbol lies, at times, the old
+miraculous communication. For, even in this late day, some of us are
+born with remembrance, with dumb worship, with intimate and uplifting
+kinship to that Mother.
+
+Since then I have asked often, in many parts of the Highlands and
+Islands, for what is known of this rite, when and where practised, and
+what meanings it bears; and some day I hope to put these notes on
+record. I am convinced that the Earth-Blessing is more ancient than the
+westward migration of the Celtic peoples.
+
+I have both read and heard of another custom, though I have not known of
+it at first-hand. The last time I was told of it was of a crofter and
+his wife in North Uist. The once general custom is remembered in a
+familiar Gaelic saying, the English of which is, "He got a turn through
+the smoke." After baptism, a child was taken from the breast, and handed
+by its mother (sometimes the child was placed in a basket) to the
+father, across the fire. I do not think, but am not sure, if any signal
+meaning lie in the mother handing the child to the father. When the rite
+is spoken of, as often as not it is only "the parents" that the speaker
+alludes to. The rite is universally recognised as a spell against the
+dominion, or agency, of evil spirits. In Coll and Tiree, it is to keep
+the Hidden People from touching or singing to the child. I think it is
+an ancient propitiatory rite, akin to that which made our ancestors
+touch the new-born to earth; as that which makes some islanders still
+baptize a child with a little spray from the running wave, or a
+fingerful of water from the tide at the flow; as that which made an old
+woman lift me as a little child and hold me up to the south wind, "to
+make me strong and fair and always young, and to keep back death and
+sorrow, and to keep me safe from other winds and evil spirits." Old
+Barabal has gone where the south wind blows, in blossom and flowers and
+green leaves, across the pastures of Death; and I ... alas, I can but
+wish that One stronger than she, for all her love, will lift me, as a
+child again, to the Wind, and pass me across the Fire, and set me down
+again upon a new Earth.
+
+
+
+
+FROM "GREEN FIRE"
+
+
+  _Be not troubled in the inward Hope. It lives in beauty, and the
+  hand of God slowly wakens it year by year, and through the many ways
+  of Sorrow. It is an Immortal, and its name is Joy._
+
+                                                               F. M.
+
+
+
+
+The Herdsman
+
+
+On the night when Alan Carmichael with his old servant and friend, Ian
+M'Ian, arrived in Balnaree ("Baile'-na-Righ"), the little village
+wherein was all that Borosay had to boast of in the way of civic life,
+he could not disguise from himself that he was regarded askance.
+
+Rightly or wrongly, he took this to be resentment because of his having
+wed (alas, he recalled, wed and lost) the daughter of the man who had
+killed Ailean Carmichael in a duel. So possessed was he by this idea,
+that he did not remember how little likely the islanders were to know
+anything of him or his beyond the fact that Ailean MacAlasdair Rhona had
+died abroad.
+
+The trouble became more than an imaginary one when, on the morrow, he
+tried to find a boat for the passage to Rona. But for the Frozen Hand,
+as the triple-peaked hill to the south of Balnaree was called, Rona
+would have been visible; nor was it, with a fair wind, more than an
+hour's sail distant.
+
+Nevertheless, he could detect in every one to whom he spoke a strange
+reluctance. At last he asked an old man of his own surname why there was
+so much difficulty.
+
+In the island way, Seumas Carmichael replied that the people on Elleray,
+the island adjacent to Rona, were unfriendly.
+
+"But unfriendly at what?"
+
+"Well, at this and at that. But for one thing, they are not having any
+dealings with the Carmichaels. They are all Macneills there, Macneills
+of Barra. There is a feud, I am thinking; though I know nothing of it;
+no, not I."
+
+"But Seumas mac Eachainn, you know well yourself that there are almost
+no Carmichaels to have a feud with! There are you and your brother, and
+there is your cousin over at Sgòrr-Bhan on the other side of Borosay.
+Who else is there?"
+
+To this the man could say nothing. Distressed, Alan sought Ian and bade
+him find out what he could. He also was puzzled and uneasy. That some
+evil was at work could not be doubted, and that it was secret boded
+ill.
+
+Ian was a stranger in Borosay because of his absence since boyhood; but,
+after all, Ian mac Iain mhic Dhonuill was to the islanders one of
+themselves; and though he came there with a man under a shadow (though
+this phrase was not used in Ian's hearing), that was not his fault.
+
+And when he reminded them that for these many years he had not seen the
+old woman, his sister Giorsal; and spoke of her, and of their long
+separation, and of his wish to see her again before he died, there was
+no more hesitation, but only kindly willingness to help.
+
+Within an hour a boat was ready to take the homefarers to the Isle of
+Caves, as Rona is sometimes called. Before the hour was gone, they, with
+the stores of food and other things, were slipping seaward out of
+Borosay Haven.
+
+The moment the headland was rounded, the heights of Rona came into view.
+Great gaunt cliffs they are, precipices of black basalt; though on the
+south side they fall away in grassy declivities which hang a greenness
+over the wandering wave for ever sobbing round that desolate shore. But
+it was not till the Sgòrr-Dhu, a conical black rock at the south-east
+end of the island, was reached, that the stone keep, known as
+Caisteal-Rhona, came in sight.
+
+It stands at the landward extreme of a rocky ledge, on the margin of a
+green _àiridh_. Westward is a small dark-blue sea loch, no more than a
+narrow haven. To the north-west rise precipitous cliffs; northward,
+above the green pasture and a stretch of heather, is a woodland belt of
+some three or four hundred pine-trees. It well deserves its poetic name
+of I-monair, as Aodh the Islander sang of it; for it echoes ceaselessly
+with wind and wave. If the waves dash against it from the south or east,
+a loud crying is upon the faces of the rocks; if from the north or
+north-east, there are unexpected inland silences, but amid the pines a
+continual voice. It is when the wind blows from the south-west, or the
+huge Atlantic billows surge out of the west, that Rona is given over to
+an indescribable tumult. Through the whole island goes the myriad echo
+of a continuous booming; and within this a sound as though waters were
+pouring through vast hidden conduits in the heart of every precipice,
+every rock, every boulder. This is because of the sea-arcades of which
+it consists, for from the westward the island has been honeycombed by
+the waves. No living man has ever traversed all those mysterious,
+winding sea-galleries. Many have perished in the attempt. In the olden
+days the Uisteans and Barrovians sought refuge there from the marauding
+Danes and other pirates out of Lochlin; and in the time when the last
+Scottish king took shelter in the west, many of his island followers
+found safety among these perilous arcades.
+
+Some of them reach an immense height. These are filled with a pale green
+gloom which in fine weather, and at noon or toward sundown, becomes
+almost radiant. But most have only a dusky green obscurity, and some are
+at all times dark with a darkness that has seen neither sun nor moon nor
+star for unknown ages. Sometimes, there, a phosphorescent wave will
+spill a livid or a cold blue flame, and for a moment a vast gulf of
+dripping basalt be revealed; but day and night, night and day, from year
+to year, from age to age, that awful wave-clamant darkness is unbroken.
+
+To the few who know some of the secrets of the passages, it is possible,
+except when a gale blows from any quarter but the north, to thread these
+dim arcades in a narrow boat, and so to pass from the Hebrid Seas to the
+outer Atlantic. But for the unwary there might well be no return; for in
+that maze of winding galleries and sea-washed, shadowy arcades,
+confusion is but another name for death. Once bewildered, there is no
+hope; and the lost adventurer will remain there idly drifting from
+barren passage to passage, till he perish of hunger and thirst, or,
+maddened by the strange and appalling gloom and the unbroken
+silence--for there the muffled voice of the sea is no more than a
+whisper--leap into the green waters which for ever slide stealthily from
+ledge to ledge.
+
+Now, as Alan approached his remote home, he thought of these
+death-haunted corridors, avenues of the grave, as they are called in the
+"Cumha Fhir-Mearanach Aonghas mhic Dhonuill"--the Lament of mad Angus
+Macdonald.
+
+When at last the unwieldy brown coble sailed into the little haven, it
+was to create unwonted excitement among the few fishermen who put in
+there frequently for bait. A group of eight or ten was upon the rocky
+ledge beyond Caisteal-Rhona, among them the elderly woman who was sister
+to Ian mac Iain.
+
+At Alan's request, Ian went ashore in advance in a small punt. He was to
+wave his hand if all were well, for Alan could not but feel
+apprehensive on account of the strange ill-will that had shown itself at
+Borosay.
+
+It was with relief that he saw the signal when, after Ian had embraced
+his sister, and shaken hands with all the fishermen, he had explained
+that the son of Ailean Carmichael was come out of the south, and had
+come to live a while at Caisteal-Rhona.
+
+All there uncovered and waved their hats. Then a shout of welcome went
+up, and Alan's heart was glad. But the moment he had set foot on land he
+saw a startled look come into the eyes of the fishermen--a look that
+deepened swiftly into one of aversion, almost of fear.
+
+One by one the men moved away, awkward in their embarrassment. Not one
+came forward with outstretched hand, or said a word of welcome.
+
+At first amazed, then indignant, Ian reproached them. They received his
+words in shamed silence. Even when with a bitter tongue he taunted them,
+they answered nothing.
+
+"Giorsal," said Ian, turning in despair to his sister, "is it madness
+that you have?"
+
+But even she was no longer the same. Her eyes were fixed upon Alan with
+a look of dread, and indeed of horror. It was unmistakable, and Alan
+himself was conscious of it with a strange sinking of the heart. "Speak,
+woman!" he demanded. "What is the meaning of this thing? Why do you and
+these men look at me askance?"
+
+"God forbid!" answered Giorsal Macdonald with white lips; "God forbid
+that we look at the son of Ailean Carmichael askance. But----"
+
+"But what?"
+
+With that the woman put her apron over her head and moved away,
+muttering strange words.
+
+"Ian, what is this mystery?"
+
+"How am I for knowing, Alan mac Ailean? It is all a darkness to me also.
+But I will be finding that out soon."
+
+That, however, was easier for Ian to say than to do. Meanwhile, the
+brown coble tacked back to Borosay, and the fisherman sailed away to the
+Barra coasts, and Alan and Ian were left solitary in their wild and
+remote home.
+
+But in that very solitude Alan found healing. From what Giorsal hinted,
+he came to believe that the fishermen had experienced one of those
+strange dream-waves which, in remote isles, occur at times, when whole
+communities will be wrought by the self-same fantasy. When day by day
+went past, and no one came near, he at first was puzzled, and even
+resentful; but this passed, and soon he was glad to be alone. Ian,
+however, knew that there was another cause for the inexplicable aversion
+that had been shown. But he was silent, and kept a patient watch for the
+hour that the future held in its shroud. As for Giorsal, she was dumb;
+but no more looked at Alan askance.
+
+And so the weeks went. Occasionally a fishing smack came with the
+provisions, for the weekly despatch of which Alan had arranged at Loch
+Boisdale, and sometimes the Barra men put in at the haven, though they
+would never stay long, and always avoided Alan as much as was possible.
+
+In that time Alan and Ian came to know and love their strangely
+beautiful island home. Hours and hours at a time they spent exploring
+the dim, green, winding sea-galleries, till at last they knew the chief
+arcades thoroughly.
+
+They had even ventured into some of the narrow, snake-like inner
+passages, but never for long, because of the awe and dread these held,
+silent estuaries of the grave.
+
+Week after week passed, and to Alan it was as the going of the grey
+owl's wing, swift and silent.
+
+
+Then it was that, on a day of the days, he was suddenly stricken with a
+new and startling dread.
+
+
+II
+
+In the hour that this terror came upon him Alan was alone upon the high
+slopes of Rona, where the grass fails and the lichen yellows at close on
+a thousand feet above the sea.
+
+The day had been cloudless since sunrise. The sea was as the single vast
+petal of an azure flower, all of one unbroken blue save for the shadows
+of the scattered isles and the slow-drifting mauve or purple of floating
+weed. Countless birds congregated from every quarter. Guillemots and
+puffins, cormorants and northern divers, everywhere darted, swam, or
+slept upon the listless ocean, whose deep breathing no more than lifted
+a league-long calm here and there, to lapse breathlike as it rose.
+Through the not less silent quietudes of air the grey skuas swept with
+curving flight, and the narrow-winged terns made a constant white
+shimmer. At remote altitudes the gannet motionlessly drifted. Oceanward
+the great widths of calm were rent now and again by the shoulders of the
+porpoises which followed the herring trail, their huge, black, revolving
+bodies looming large above the silent wave. Not a boat was visible
+anywhere; not even upon the most distant horizons did a brown sail fleck
+itself duskily against the skyward wall of steely blue.
+
+In the great stillness which prevailed, the noise of the surf beating
+around the promontory of Aonaig was audible as a whisper; though even in
+that windless hour the confused rumour of the sea, moving through the
+arcades of the island, filled the hollow of the air overhead. Ever since
+the early morning Alan had moved under a strange gloom. Out of that
+golden glory of midsummer a breath of joyous life should have reached
+his heart, but it was not so. For sure, there is sometimes in the quiet
+beauty of summer an air of menace, a premonition of suspended force--a
+force antagonistic and terrible. All who have lived in these lonely
+isles know the peculiar intensity of this summer melancholy. No noise of
+wind, no prolonged season of untimely rains, no long baffling of mists
+in all the drear inclemencies of that remote region, can produce the
+same ominous and even paralysing gloom sometimes born of ineffable
+peace and beauty. Is it that in the human soul there is a mysterious
+kinship with the outer soul which we call Nature; and that in these few
+supreme hours which come at the full of the year, we are, sometimes,
+suddenly aware of the tremendous forces beneath and behind us, momently
+quiescent?
+
+Determined to shake off this dejection, Alan wandered high among the
+upland solitudes. There a cool air moved always, even in the noons of
+August; and there, indeed, often had come upon him a deep peace. But
+whatsoever the reason, only a deeper despondency possessed him. An
+incident, significant in that mood, at that time, happened then. A few
+hundred yards away from where he stood, half hidden in a little glen
+where a fall of water tossed its spray among the shadows of rowan and
+birch, was the bothie of a woman, the wife of Neil MacNeill, a fisherman
+of Aoinaig. She was there, he knew, for the summer pasturing; and even
+as he recollected this, he heard the sound of her voice as she sang
+somewhere by the burnside. Moving slowly toward the corrie, he stopped
+at a mountain ash which over hung a pool. Looking down, he saw the
+woman, Morag MacNeill, washing and peeling potatoes in the clear brown
+water. And as she washed and peeled, she sang an old-time shealing hymn
+of the Virgin-Shepherdess, of Michael the White, and of Columan the
+Dove. It was a song that, years ago, far away in Brittany, he had heard
+from his mother's lips. He listened now to every word of the doubly
+familiar Gaelic; and when Morag ended, the tears were in his eyes, and
+he stood for a while as one under a spell.[13]
+
+    "A Mhicheil mhin! nan steud geala,
+    A choisin cios air Dragon fala,
+    Air ghaol Dia 'us Mhic Muire,
+    Sgaoil do sgiath oirnn dian sinn uile,
+    Sgaoil do sgiath oirnn dian sinn uile.
+
+    "A Mhoire ghradhach! Mathair Uain-ghil,
+    Cobhair oirnne, Oigh na h-uaisle;
+    A rioghainn uai'reach! a bhuachaille nan treud!
+    Cum ar cuallach cuartaich sinn le cheil,
+    Cum ar cuallach cuartaich sinn le cheil.
+
+    "A Chalum-Chille: chairdeil, chaoimh,
+    An ainm Athar, Mic, 'us Spioraid Naoimh,
+    Trid na Trithinn! trid na Triath!
+    Comraig sinne, gleidh ar trial,
+    Comraig sinne, gleidh ar trial.
+
+    "Athair! A Mhic! A Spioraid Naoimh!
+    Bi'eadh an Tri-Aon leinn, a la's a dh-oidhche!
+    'S air chul nan tonn, no air thaobh nan beann,
+    Bi'dh ar Mathair leinn, 's bith a lamh fo'r ceann,
+    Bi'dh ar Mathair leinn, 's bith a lamh fo'r ceann.
+
+    "Thou gentle Michael of the white steed,
+    Who subdued the Dragon of blood,
+    For love of God and the Son of Mary,
+    Spread over us thy wing, shield us all!
+    Spread over us thy wing, shield us all!
+
+    "Mary beloved! Mother of the White Lamb,
+    Protect us, thou Virgin of nobleness,
+    Queen of beauty! Shepherdess of the flocks!
+    Keep our cattle, surround us together,
+    Keep our cattle, surround us together.
+
+    "Thou Columba, the friendly, the kind,
+    In name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit Holy,
+    Through the Three-in-One, through the Three,
+    Encompass us, guard our procession,
+    Encompass us, guard our procession.
+
+    "Thou Father! thou Son! thou Spirit Holy!
+    Be the Three-in-One with us day and night.
+    And on the crested wave, or on the mountain side.
+    Our Mother is there, and her arm is under our head,
+    Our Mother is there, and her arm is under our head."
+
+Alan found himself repeating whisperingly, and again and again--
+
+    "Bi 'eadh an Tri-Aon leinn, a la's a dh-oidhche!
+    'S air chul nan tonn, no air thaobh nam beann."
+
+Suddenly the woman glanced upward, perhaps because of the shadow that
+moved against the green bracken below. With a startled gesture she
+sprang to her feet. Alan looked at her kindly, saying, with a smile,
+"Sure, Morag nic Tormod, it is not fear you need be having of one who is
+your friend." Then, seeing that the woman stared at him with something
+of terror as well as surprise, he spoke to her again.
+
+"Sure, Morag, I am no stranger that you should be looking at me with
+those foreign eyes." He laughed as he spoke, and made as though he were
+about to descend to the burnside. Unmistakably, however, the woman did
+not desire his company. He saw this, with the pain and bewilderment
+which had come upon him whenever the like happened, as so often it had
+happened since he had come to Rona.
+
+"Tell me, Morag MacNeill, what is the meaning of this strangeness that
+is upon you? Why do you not speak? Why do you turn away your head?"
+
+Suddenly the woman flashed her black eyes upon him.
+
+"Have you ever heard of _am Buachaill Bàn--am Buachaill Buidhe?_"
+
+He looked at her in amaze. _Am Buachaill Bàn!_ ... The fair-haired
+Herdsman, the yellow-haired Herdsman! What could she mean? In days gone
+by, he knew, the islanders, in the evil time after Culloden, had so
+named the fugitive Prince who had sought shelter in the Hebrides; and in
+some of the runes of an older day still the Saviour of the World was
+sometimes so called, just as Mary was called _Bhuachaile nan
+treud_--Shepherdess of the Flock. But it could be no allusion to either
+of these that was intended.
+
+"Who is the Herdsman of whom you speak, Morag?"
+
+"Is it no knowledge you have of him at all, Alan MacAilean?"
+
+"None. I know nothing of the man, nothing of what is in your mind. Who
+is the Herdsman?"
+
+"You will not be putting evil upon me because that you saw me here by
+the pool before I saw you?"
+
+"Why should I, woman? Why do you think that I have the power of the evil
+eye? Sure, I have done no harm to you or yours, and wish none. But if it
+is for peace to you to know it, it is no evil I wish you, but only
+good. The Blessing of Himself be upon you and yours and upon your
+house!"
+
+The woman looked relieved, but still cast her furtive gaze upon Alan,
+who no longer attempted to join her.
+
+"I cannot be speaking the thing that is in my mind, Alan MacAilean. It
+is not for me to be saying that thing. But if you have no knowledge of
+the Herdsman, sure it is only another wonder of the wonders, and God has
+the sun on that shadow, to the Stones be it said."
+
+"But tell me, Morag, who is the Herdsman of whom you speak?"
+
+For a minute or more the woman stood regarding him intently. Then
+slowly, and with obvious reluctance, she spoke--
+
+"Why have you appeared to the people upon the isles, sometimes by
+moonlight, sometimes by day or in the dusk, and have foretold upon one
+and all who dwell here black gloom and the red flame of sorrow? Why have
+you, who are an outcast because of what lies between you and another,
+pretended to be a messenger of the Son--ay, for sure, even, God forgive
+you, to be the Son Himself?"
+
+Alan stared at the woman. For a time he could utter no word. Had some
+extraordinary delusion spread among the islanders, and was there in the
+insane accusation of this woman the secret of that which had so troubled
+him?
+
+"This is all an empty darkness to me, Morag. Speak more plainly, woman.
+What is all this madness that you say? When have I spoken of having any
+mission, or of being other than I am? When have I foretold evil upon you
+or yours, or upon the isles beyond? What man has ever dared to say that
+Alan MacAilean of Rona is an outcast? And what sin is it that lies
+between me and another of which you know?"
+
+It was impossible for Morag MacNeill to doubt the sincerity of the man
+who spoke to her. She crossed herself, and muttered the words of a
+_seun_ for the protection of the soul against the demon powers. Still,
+even while she believed in Alan's sincerity, she could not reconcile it
+with that terrible and strange mystery with which rumour had filled her
+ears. So, having nothing to say in reply to his eager questions, she
+cast down her eyes and kept silence.
+
+"Speak, Morag, for Heaven's sake! Speak if you are a true woman; you
+that see a man in sore pain, in pain, too, for that of which he knows
+nothing, and of the ill of which he is guiltless!"
+
+But, keeping her face averted, the woman muttered simply, "I have no
+more to say." With that she turned and moved slowly along the pathway
+which led from the pool to her hillside bothie.
+
+With a sigh, Alan walked slowly away. What wonder, he thought, that deep
+gloom had been upon him that day? Here, in the woman's mysterious words,
+was the shadow of that shadow.
+
+Slowly, brooding deep over what he had heard, he crossed the
+Monadh-nan-Con, as the hill-tract there was called, till he came to the
+rocky wilderness known as the Slope of the Caverns.
+
+There for a time he leaned against a high boulder, idly watching a few
+sheep nibbling the short grass which grew about some of the many caves
+which opened in slits or wide hollows. Below and beyond he saw the pale
+blue silence of the sea meet the pale blue silence of the sky;
+south-westward, the grey film of the coast of Ulster; westward, again
+the illimitable vast of sea and sky, infinitudes of calm, as though the
+blue silence of heaven breathed in that one motionless wave, as though
+that wave sighed and drew the horizons to its heart. From where he
+stood he could hear the murmur of the surge whispering all round the
+isle; the surge that, even on days of profound stillness, makes a
+murmurous rumour among the rocks and shingle of the island shores. Not
+upon the moor-side, but in the blank hollows of the caves around him, he
+heard, as in gigantic shells, the moving of a strange and solemn rhythm:
+wave-haunted shells indeed, for the echo that was bruited from one to
+the other came from beneath, from out of those labyrinthine passages and
+dim, shadowy sea-arcades, where among the melancholy green glooms the
+Atlantic waters lose themselves in a vain wandering.
+
+For long he leaned there, revolving in his mind the mystery of Morag
+MacNeill's words. Then, abruptly, the stillness was broken by the sound
+of a dislodged stone. So little did he expect the foot of fellow-man,
+that he did not turn at what he thought to be the slip of a sheep. But
+when upon the slope of the grass, a little way beyond where he stood, a
+dusky blue shadow wavered fantastically, he swung round with a sudden
+instinct of dread.
+
+And this was the dread which, after these long weeks since he had come
+to Rona, was upon Alan Carmichael.
+
+For there, standing quietly by another boulder, at the mouth of another
+cave, was a man in all appearance identical with himself. Looking at
+this apparition, he beheld one of the same height as himself, with hair
+of the same hue, with eyes the same and features the same, with the same
+carriage, the same smile, the same expression. No, there, and there
+alone, was any difference.
+
+Sick at heart, Alan wondered if he looked upon his own wraith. Familiar
+with the legends of his people, it would have been no strange thing to
+him that there, upon the hillside, should appear the wraith of himself.
+Had not old Ian McIain--and that, too, though far away in a strange
+land--seen the death of his mother moving upward from her feet to her
+knees, from her knees to her waist, from her waist to her neck, and,
+just before the end, how the shroud darkened along the face until it hid
+the eyes? Had he not often heard from her, from Ian, of the second self
+which so often appears beside the living when already the shadow of doom
+is upon him whose hours are numbered? Was this, then, the reason of what
+had been his inexplicable gloom? Was he indeed at the extreme of life?
+Was his soul amid shallows, already a rock upon a blank, inhospitable
+shore? If not, who or what was this second self which leaned there
+negligently, looking at him with scornful smiling lips, but with intent,
+unsmiling eyes.
+
+Slowly there came into his mind this thought: How could a phantom, that
+was itself intangible, throw a shadow upon the grass, as though it were
+a living body? Sure, a shadow there was indeed. It lay between the
+apparition and himself. A legend heard in boyhood came back to him;
+instinctively he stooped and lifted a stone and flung it midway into the
+shadow.
+
+"Go back into the darkness," he cried, "if out of the darkness you came;
+but if you be a living thing, put out your hands!"
+
+The shadow remained motionless. When Alan looked again at his second
+self, he saw that the scorn which had been upon the lips was now in the
+eyes also. Ay, for sure, scornful silent laughter it was that lay in
+those cold wells of light. No phantom that; a man he, even as Alan
+himself. His heart pulsed like that of a trapped bird, but with the
+spoken word his courage came back to him.
+
+"Who are you?" he asked, in a voice strange even in his own ears.
+
+"_Am Buachaill_," replied the man in a voice as low and strange. "I am
+the Herdsman."
+
+A new tide of fear surged in upon Alan. That voice, was it not his own?
+that tone, was it not familiar in his ears? When the man spoke, he heard
+himself speak; sure, if he were _Am Buachaill Bàn_, Alan, too, was the
+Herdsman, though what fantastic destiny might be his was all unknown to
+him.
+
+"Come near," said the man, and now the mocking light in his eyes was
+wild as cloud-fire--"come near, oh _Buachaill Bàn_!"
+
+With a swift movement, Alan sprang forward; but as he leaped, his foot
+caught in a spray of heather, and he stumbled and fell. When he rose, he
+looked in vain for the man who had called him. There was not a sign, not
+a trace of any living being. For the first few moments he believed it
+had all been a delusion. Mortal being did not appear and vanish in that
+ghostly way. Still, surely he could not have mistaken the blank of that
+place for a speaking voice, or out of nothingness have fashioned the
+living phantom of himself? Or could he? With that, he strode forward and
+peered into the wide arch of the cavern by which the man had stood. He
+could not see far into it; but so far as it was possible to see, he
+discerned neither man nor shadow of man, nor anything that stirred; no,
+not even the gossamer bloom of a beàrnan-bride, that grew on a patch of
+grass a yard or two within the darkness, had lost one of its delicate
+filmy spires. He drew back, dismayed. Then, suddenly, his heart leaped
+again, for beyond all question, all possible doubt, there, in the bent
+thyme, just where the man had stood, was the imprint of his feet. Even
+now the green sprays were moving forward.
+
+
+III
+
+An hour passed, and Alan Carmichael had not moved from the entrance to
+the cave. So still was he that a ewe, listlessly wandering in search of
+cooler grass, lay down after a while, drowsily regarding him with her
+amber-coloured eyes. All his thought was upon the mystery of what he had
+seen. No delusion this, he was sure. That was a man whom he had seen.
+But who could he be? On so small an island, inhabited by less than a
+score of crofters, it was scarcely possible for one to live for many
+weeks and not know the name and face of every soul. Still, a stranger
+might have come. Only, if this were so, why should he call himself the
+Herdsman? There was but one herdsman on Rona and he Angus MacCormic, who
+lived at Einaval on the north side. In these outer isles, the shepherd
+and the herdsman are appointed by the community, and no man is allowed
+to be one or the other at will, any more than to be a _maor_. Then, too,
+if this man were indeed herdsman, where was his _iomair-ionailtair_, his
+browsing tract? Looking round him, Alan could perceive nowhere any
+fitting pasture. Surely no herdsman would be content with such an
+_iomair a bhuachaill_--rig of the herdsman--as that rocky wilderness
+where the soft green grass grew in patches under this or that boulder,
+on the sun side of this or that rocky ledge. Again, he had given no
+name, but called himself simply _Am Buachaill_. This was how the woman
+Morag had spoken; did she indeed mean this very man? and if so, what lay
+in her words? But far beyond all other bewilderment for him was that
+strange, that indeed terrifying likeness to himself--a likeness so
+absolute, so convincing, that he knew he might himself easily have been
+deceived, had he beheld the apparition in any place where it was
+possible that a reflection could have misled him.
+
+Brooding thus, eye and ear were both alert for the faintest sight or
+sound. But from the interior of the cavern not a breath came. Once, from
+among the jagged rocks high on the west slope of Ben Einaval, he
+fancied he heard an unwonted sound--that of human laughter, but laughter
+so wild, so remote, so unmirthful, that fear was in his heart. It could
+not be other than imagination, he said to himself; for in that lonely
+place there was none to wander idly at that season, and none who,
+wandering, would laugh there solitary.
+
+It was with an effort that Alan at last determined to probe the mystery.
+Stooping, he moved cautiously into the cavern, and groped his way along
+the narrow passage which led, as he thought, into another larger cave.
+But this proved to be one of the innumerable blind ways which intersect
+the honeycombed slopes of the Isle of Caves. To wander far in these
+lightless passages would be to track death. Long ago the piper whom the
+Prionnsa-Bàn, the Fair Prince, loved to hear in his exile--he that was
+called Rory M'Vurich--penetrated one of the larger hollows to seek there
+for a child that had idly wandered into the dark. Some of the clansmen,
+with the father and mother of the little one, waited at the entrance to
+the cave. For a time there was silence; then, as agreed upon, the sound
+of the pipes was heard, to which a man named Lachlan M'Lachlan replied
+from the outer air. The skirl of the pipes within grew fainter and
+fainter. Louder and louder Lachlan played upon his chanter; deeper and
+deeper grew the wild moaning of the drone; but for all that, fainter and
+fainter waned the sound of the pipes of Rory M'Vurich. Generations have
+come and gone upon the isle, and still no man has heard the returning
+air which Rory was to play. He may have found the little child, but he
+never found his backward path, and in the gloom of that honeycombed hill
+he and the child and the music of the pipes lapsed into the same
+stillness. Remembering this legend, familiar to him since his boyhood,
+Alan did not dare to venture further. At any moment, too, he knew he
+might fall into one of the crevices which opened into the sea-corridors
+hundreds of feet below. Ancient rumour had it that there were mysterious
+passages from the upper heights of Ben Einaval which led into the heart
+of this perilous maze. But for a time he lay still, straining every
+sense. Convinced at last that the man whom he sought had evaded all
+possible quest, he turned to regain the light. Brief way as he had gone,
+this was no easy thing to do. For a few moments, indeed, Alan lost his
+self-possession when he found a uniform dusk about him, and could not
+discern which of the several branching narrow corridors was that by
+which he had come. But following the greener light, he reached the cave,
+and soon, with a sigh of relief, was upon the sun-sweet warm earth
+again.
+
+How more than ever beautiful the world seemed! how sweet to the eyes
+were upland and cliff, the wide stretch of ocean, the flying birds, the
+sheep grazing on the scanty pastures, and, above all, the homely blue
+smoke curling faintly upward from the fisher crofts on the headland east
+of Aonaig!
+
+Purposely he retraced his steps by the way of the glen: he would see the
+woman Morag MacNeill again, and insist on some more explicit word. But
+when he reached the burnside once more, the woman was not there.
+Possibly she had seen him coming, and guessed his purpose; half he
+surmised this, for the peats in the hearth were brightly aglow, and on
+the hob beside them the boiling water hissed in a great iron pot wherein
+were potatoes. In vain he sought, in vain called. Impatient, he walked
+around the bothie and into the little byre beyond. The place was
+deserted. This, small matter as it was, added to his disquietude.
+Resolved to sift the mystery, he walked swiftly down the slope. By the
+old shealing of Cnoc-na-Monie, now forsaken, his heart leaped at sight
+of Ian coming to meet him.
+
+When they met, Alan put his hands lovingly on the old man's shoulders,
+and looked at him with questioning eyes. He found rest and hope in those
+deep pools of quiet light, whence the faithful love rose comfortingly to
+meet his own yearning gaze.
+
+"What is it, Alan-mo-ghray; what is the trouble that is upon you?"
+
+"It is a trouble, Ian, but one of which I can speak little, for it is
+little I know."
+
+"Now, now, for sure you must tell me what it is."
+
+"I have seen a man here upon Rona whom I have not seen or met before,
+and it is one whose face is known to me, and whose voice too, and one
+whom I would not meet again."
+
+"Did he give you no name?"
+
+"None."
+
+"Where did he come from? Where did he go to?"
+
+"He came out of the shadow, and into the shadow he went."
+
+Ian looked steadfastly at Alan, his wistful gaze searching deep into his
+unquiet eyes, and thence from feature to feature of the face which had
+become strangely worn of late.
+
+But he questioned no further.
+
+"I, too, Alan MacAilean, have heard a strange thing to-day. You know old
+Marsail Macrae? She is ill now with a slow fever, and she thinks that
+the shadow which she saw lying upon her hearth last Sabbath, when
+nothing was there to cause any shadow, was her own death, come for her,
+and now waiting there. I spoke to the old woman, but she would not have
+peace, and her eyes looked at me.
+
+"'What will it be now, Marsail?' I asked.
+
+"'Ay, ay, for sure,' she said, 'it was I who saw you first.'
+
+"'Saw me first, Marsail?'
+
+"'Ay, you and Alan MacAilean.'
+
+"'When and where was this sight upon you?'
+
+"'It was one month before you and he came to Rona.'
+
+"I asked the poor old woman to be telling me her meaning. At first I
+could make little of what was said, for she muttered low, and moved her
+head this way and that, and moaned like a stricken ewe. But on my taking
+her hand, she looked at me again, and then told me this thing--
+
+"'On the seventh day of the month before you came--and by the same token
+it was on the seventh day of the month following that you and Alan
+McAilean came to Caisteal-Rhona--I was upon the shore at Aonaig,
+listening to the crying of the wind against the great cliff of
+Biola-creag. With me were Ruaridh Macrae and Neil MacNeill, Morag
+MacNeill, and her sister Elsa; and we were singing the hymn for those
+who were out on the wild sea that was roaring white against the cliffs
+of Berneray, for some of our people were there, and we feared for them.
+Sometimes one sang, and sometimes another. And sure, it is remembering I
+am, how, when I had called out with my old wailing voice--
+
+    "'Bi 'eadh an Tri-aon leinn, a la's a dh-oidche;
+    'S air chul nan tonn, A Mhoire ghradhach!
+
+    (Be the Three-in-One with us day and night;
+    And on the crested wave, O Mary Beloved!)
+
+"'Now when I had just sung this, and we were all listening to the sound
+of it caught by the wind and blown up against the black face of
+Biola-creag, I saw a boat come sailing into the haven. I called out to
+those about me, but they looked at me with white faces, for no boat was
+there, and it was a rough, wild sea it was in that haven.
+
+"'And in that boat I saw three people sitting; and one was you, Ian
+MacIain, and one was a man who had his face in shadow, and his eyes
+looked into the shadow at his feet. I saw you clear, and told those
+about me what I saw.' And Seumas MacNeill, him that is dead now, and
+brother to Neil here at Aonaig, he said to me, 'Who was that whom you
+saw walking in the dusk the night before last?'--'Ailean MacAlasdair
+Carmichael,' answered one at that. Seumas muttered, looking at those,
+about him, 'Mark what I say, for it is a true thing--that Ailean
+Carmichael of Rona is dead now, because Marsail saw him walking in the
+dusk when he was not upon the island; and now, you Neil, and you Rory,
+and all of you, will be for thinking with me that one of the men in the
+boat whom Marsail sees now will be the son of him who has changed.'
+
+"Well, well, it is a true thing that we each of us thought that thought,
+but when the days went and nothing more came of it, the memory of the
+seeing went too. Then there came the day when the coble of Aulay
+MacAulay came out of Borosay into Caisteal-Rhona haven. Glad we were to
+see your face again, Ian McIain, and to hear the sob of joy coming out
+of the heart of Giorsal your sister; but when you and Alan MacAilean
+came on shore, it was my voice that then went from mouth to mouth, for
+I whispered to Morag MacNeill who was next me that you were the men I
+had seen in the boat.'
+
+"Well, after that," Ian added, with a grave smile, "I spoke gently to
+old Marsail, and told her that there was no evil in that seeing, and
+that for sure it was nothing at all, at all, to see two people in a
+boat, and nothing coming of that, save happiness for those two, and glad
+content to be here.
+
+"Marsail looked at me with big eyes.
+
+"But when I asked her what she meant by that, she would say no more. No
+asking of mine would bring the word to her lips, only she shook her head
+and kept her gaze from my face. Then, seeing that it was useless, I said
+to her--
+
+"'Marsail, tell me this: Was this sight of yours the sole thing that
+made the people here on Rona look askance at Alan MacAilean?'
+
+"For a time she stared at me with dim eyes, then suddenly she spoke--
+
+"'It is not all.'
+
+"'Then what more is there, Marsail Macrae?'
+
+"'That is not for the saying. I have no more to say. Let you, or Alan
+MacAilean, go elsewhere. That which is to be, will be. To each his own
+end.'
+
+"'Then be telling me this now at least,' I asked: 'is there danger for
+him or me in this island?'
+
+"But the poor old woman would say no more, and then I saw a swoon was on
+her."
+
+After this, Alan and Ian walked slowly home together, both silent, and
+each revolving in his mind as in a dim dusk that mystery which, vague
+and unreal at first, had now become a living presence, and haunted them
+by day and night.
+
+
+IV
+
+"In the shadow of pain, one may hear the footsteps of joy." So runs a
+proverb of old.
+
+It was a true saying for Alan. That night he lay down in pain, his heart
+heavy with the weight of a mysterious burden. On the morrow he woke
+blithely to a new day--a day of absolute beauty. The whole wide
+wilderness of ocean was of living azure, aflame with gold and silver.
+Around the promontories of the isles the brown-sailed fishing-boats of
+Barra and Berneray, of Borosay and Seila, moved blithely hither and
+thither. Everywhere the rhythm of life pulsed swift and strong. The
+first sound which had awakened Alan was of a loud singing of fishermen
+who were putting out from Aonaig. The coming of a great shoal of
+mackerel had been signalled, and every man and woman of the near isles
+was alert for the take. The watchers had known it by the swift
+congregation of birds, particularly the gannets and skuas. And as the
+men pulled at the oars, or hoisted the brown sails, they sang a snatch
+of an old-world tune, still chanted at the first coming of the birds
+when spring-tide is on the flow again--
+
+    "Bui' cheas dha 'n Ti thaine na Gugachan
+    Thaine's na h-Eoin-Mhora cuideriu,
+    Cailin dugh ciaru bo's a chro!
+    Bo dhonn! bo dhonn! bo dhonn bheadarrach!
+    Bo dhonn a ruin a bhlitheadh am baine dhuit
+    Ho ro! mo gheallag! ni gu rodagach!
+    Cailin dugh ciaru bo's a chro--
+    Na h-eoin air tighinn! cluinneam an ceol!"
+
+    (Thanks to the Being, the Gannets have come,
+    Yes! and the Great Auks along with them.
+    Dark-haired girl!--a cow in the fold!
+    Brown cow! brown cow! brown cow, beloved ho!
+    Brown cow! my love! the milker of milk to thee!
+    Ho ro! my fair-skinned girl--a cow, in the fold,
+    And the birds have come!--glad sight, I see!)
+
+Eager to be of help, Ian put off in his boat, and was soon among the
+fishermen, who in their new excitement were forgetful of all else than
+that the mackerel were come, and that every moment was precious. For the
+first time Ian found himself no unwelcome comrade. Was it, he wondered,
+because that, there upon the sea, whatever of shadow dwelled about him,
+or rather about Alan MacAilean, on the land, was no longer visible.
+
+All through that golden noon he and the others worked hard. From isle to
+isle went the chorus of the splashing oars and splashing nets; of the
+splashing of the fish and the splashing of gannets and gulls; of the
+splashing of the tide leaping blithely against the sun-dazzle, and the
+illimitable rippling splash moving out of the west;--all this blent with
+the loud, joyous cries, the laughter, and the hoarse shouts of the men
+of Barra and the adjacent islands. It was close upon dusk before the
+Rona boats put into the haven of Aonaig again; and by that time none was
+blither than Ian MacIain, who in that day of happy toil had lost all the
+gloom and apprehension of the day before, and now returned to
+Caisteal-Rhona with lighter heart than he had known for long.
+
+When, however, he got there, there was no sign of Alan. He had gone,
+said Giorsal, he had gone out in the smaller boat midway in the
+afternoon, and had sailed around to Aoidhu, the great scaur which ran
+out beyond the precipices at the south-west of Rona.
+
+This Alan often did, and of late more and more often. Ever since he had
+come to the Hebrid Isles his love of the sea had deepened and had grown
+into a passion for its mystery and beauty. Of late, too, something
+impelled to a more frequent isolation, a deep longing to be where no eye
+could see and no ear hearken.
+
+So at first Ian was in no way alarmed. But when the sun had set, and
+over the faint blue film of the Isle of Tiree the moon had risen, and
+still no sign of Alan, he became restless and uneasy. Giorsal begged him
+in vain to eat of the supper she had prepared. Idly he moved to and fro
+along the rocky ledge, or down by the pebbly shore, or across the green
+_àiridh_, eager for a glimpse of him whom he loved so well.
+
+At last, unable longer to endure a growing anxiety, he put out in his
+boat, and sailed swiftly before the slight easterly breeze which had
+prevailed since moonrise. So far as Aoidhu, all the way from Aonaig,
+there was not a haven anywhere, nor even one of the sea caverns which
+honeycombed the isle beyond the headland. A glance, therefore, showed
+him that Alan had not yet come back that way. It was possible, though
+unlikely, that he had sailed right round Rona; unlikely, because in the
+narrow straits to the north, between Rona and the scattered islets known
+as the Innsemhara, strong currents prevailed, and particularly at the
+full of the tide, when they swept north-eastward dark and swift as a
+mill-race.
+
+Once the headland was passed and the sheer precipitous westward cliffs
+loomed black out of the sea, he became more and more uneasy. As yet,
+there was no danger; but he saw that a swell was moving out of the west;
+and whenever the wind blew that way, the sea-arcades were filled with a
+lifting, perilous wave. Later, escape might be difficult, and often
+impossible. Out of the score or more great passages which opened between
+Aoidhu and Ardgorm, it was difficult to know into which to chance the
+search of Alan. Together they had examined all of them. Some twisted but
+slightly; others wound sinuously till the green, serpentine alleys,
+flanked by basalt walls hundreds of feet high, lost themselves in an
+indistinguishable maze.
+
+But that which was safest, and wherein a boat could most easily make its
+way against wind or tide, was the huge, cavernous passage known locally
+as the Uaimh-nan-roin, the Cave of the Seals.
+
+For this opening Ian steered his boat. Soon he was within the wide
+corridor. Like the great cave at Staffa, it was wrought as an aisle in
+some natural cathedral; the rocks, too, were columnar, and rose in
+flawless symmetry, as though graven by the hand of man. At the far end
+of this gigantic aisle, there diverges a long, narrow arcade, filled by
+day with the green shine of the water, and by night, when the moon is
+up, with a pale froth of light. It is one of the few where there are
+open gateways for the sea and the wandering light, and by its spherical
+shape almost the only safe passage in a season of heavy wind. Half-way
+along this arched arcade a corridor leads to a round cup-like cavern,
+midway in which stands a huge mass of black basalt, in shape suggestive
+of a titanic altar. Thus it must have impressed the imagination of the
+islanders of old; for by them, even in a remote day, it was called
+Teampull-Mara, the Temple of the Sea. Owing to the narrowness of the
+passage, and to the smooth, unbroken walls which rise sheer from the
+green depths into an invisible darkness, the Strait of the Temple is not
+one wherein to linger long, save in a time of calm.
+
+Instinctively, however, Ian quietly headed his boat along this narrow
+way. When, silently, he emerged from the arcade, he could just discern
+the mass of basalt at the far end of the cavern. But there, seated in
+his boat, was Alan, apparently idly adrift, for one oar floated in the
+water alongside, and the other swung listlessly from the tholes.
+
+His heart had a suffocating grip as he saw him whom he had come to seek.
+Why that absolute stillness, that strange, listless indifference? For a
+dreadful moment he feared death had indeed come to him in that lonely
+place where, as an ancient legend had it, a woman of old time had
+perished, and ever since had wrought death upon any who came thither
+solitary and unhappy.
+
+But at the striking of the shaft of his oar against a ledge, Alan moved,
+and looked at him with startled eyes. Half rising from where he crouched
+in the stern, he called to him in a voice that had in it something
+strangely unfamiliar.
+
+"I will not hear!" he cried. "I will not hear! Leave me! Leave me!"
+
+Fearing that the desolation of the place had wrought upon his mind, Ian
+swiftly moved toward him, and the next moment his boat glided alongside.
+Stepping from the one to the other, he kneeled beside him.
+
+"_Ailean mo caraid, Ailean-aghray_, what is it? What gives you dread?
+There is no harm here. All is well. Look! See, it is I, Ian--old Ian
+MacIain! Listen, _mo ghaoil_; do you not know me--do you not know who I
+am? It is I, Ian; Ian who loves you!"
+
+Even in that obscure light he could clearly discern the pale face, and
+his heart smote him as he saw Alan's eyes turn upon him with a glance
+wild and mournful. Had he indeed succumbed to the sea madness which ever
+and again strikes into a terrible melancholy one here and there among
+those who dwell in the remote isles? But even as he looked, he noted
+another expression come into the wild strained eyes; and almost before
+he realised what had happened, Alan was on his feet and pointing with
+rigid arm.
+
+For there, in that nigh unreachable and for ever unvisited solitude, was
+the figure of a man. He stood on the summit of the huge basalt altar,
+and appeared to have sprung from out the rock, or, himself a shadowy
+presence, to have grown out of the obscure unrealities of the darkness.
+Ian stared, fascinated, speechless.
+
+Then with a spring he was on the ledge. Swift and sure as a wild cat, he
+scaled the huge mass of the altar.
+
+Nothing; no one! There was not a trace of any human being. Not a bird,
+not a bat; nothing. Moreover, even in that slowly blackening darkness,
+he could see that there was no direct connection between the summit or
+side with the blank, precipitous wall of basalt beyond. Overhead there
+was, so far as he could discern, a vault. No human being could have
+descended through that perilous gulf.
+
+Was the island haunted? he wondered, as slowly he made his way back to
+the boat. Or had he been startled by some wild fantasy, and imagined a
+likeness where none had been? Perhaps even he had not really seen any
+one. He had heard of such things. The nerves can soon chase the mind
+into the shadow wherein it loses itself.
+
+Or was Alan the vain dreamer? That, indeed, might well be. Mayhap he had
+heard some fantastic tale from Morag MacNeill, or from old Marsail
+Macrae; the islanders had _sgeul_ after _sgeul_ of a wild strangeness.
+
+In silence he guided the boats back into the outer arcade, where a faint
+sheen of moonlight glistened on the water. Thence, in a few minutes, he
+oared that wherein he and Alan sat, with the other fastened astern, into
+the open.
+
+When the moonshine lay full on Alan's face, Ian saw that he was thinking
+neither of himself nor of where he was. His eyes were heavy with dream.
+
+What wind there was blew against their course, so Ian rowed unceasingly.
+In silence they passed once again the headland of Aoidhu; in silence
+they drifted past a single light gleaming in a croft near Aonaig--a red
+eye staring out into the shadow of the sea, from the room where the
+woman Marsail lay dying; and in silence their keels grided on the patch
+of shingle in Caisteal-Rhona haven.
+
+
+For days thereafter Alan haunted that rocky, cavernous wilderness where
+he had seen the Herdsman.
+
+It was in vain he had sought everywhere for some tidings of this
+mysterious dweller in those upland solitudes. At times he believed that
+there was indeed some one upon the island of whom, for inexplicable
+reasons, none there would speak; but at last he came to the conviction
+that what he had seen was an apparition, projected by the fantasy of
+overwrought nerves. Even from the woman Morag MacNeill, to whom he had
+gone with a frank appeal that won its way to her heart, he learned no
+more than that an old legend, of which she did not care to speak, was in
+some way associated with his own coming to Rona.
+
+Ian, too, never once alluded to the mysterious incident of the green
+arcades which had so deeply impressed them both: never after Alan had
+told him that he had seen a vision.
+
+But as the days passed, and as no word came to either of any unknown
+person who was on the island, and as Alan, for all his patient wandering
+and furtive quest, both among the upland caves and in the green arcades,
+found absolutely no traces of him whom he sought, the belief that he had
+been duped by his imagination deepened almost to conviction.
+
+As for Ian, he, unlike Alan, became more and more convinced that what he
+had seen was indeed no apparition. Whatever lingering doubt he had was
+dissipated on the eve of the night when old Marsail Macrae died. It was
+dusk when word came to Caisteal-Rhona that Marsail felt the cold wind
+on the soles of her feet. Ian went to her at once, and it was in the
+dark hour which followed that he heard once more, and more fully, the
+strange story which, like a poisonous weed, had taken root in the minds
+of the islanders. Already from Marsail he had heard of the Prophet,
+though, strangely enough, he had never breathed word of this to Alan,
+not even when, after the startling episode of the apparition in the
+Teampull-Mara, he had, as he believed, seen the Prophet himself. But
+there in the darkness of the low, turfed cottage, with no light in the
+room save the dull red gloom from the heart of the smoored peats,
+Marsail, in the attenuated, remote voice of those who have already
+entered into the vale of the shadow, told him this thing, in the
+homelier Gaelic--
+
+"Yes, Ian mac Iain-Bàn, I will be telling you this thing before I
+change. You are for knowing, sure, that long ago Uilleam, brother of him
+who was father to the lad up at the castle yonder, had a son? Yes, you
+know that, you say, and also that he was called Donnacha Bàn? No,
+mo-caraid, that is not a true thing that you have heard, that Donnacha
+Bàn went under the waves years ago. He was the seventh son, an' was born
+under the full moon; 'tis Himself will be knowing whether that was for
+or against him. Of these seven none lived beyond childhood except the
+two youngest, Kenneth an' Donnacha. Kenneth was always frail as a
+February flower, but he lived to be a man. He an' his brother never
+spoke, for a feud was between them, not only because that each was
+unlike the other, an' the younger hated the older because through him he
+was the penniless one, but most because both loved the same woman. I am
+not for telling you the whole story now, for the breath in my body will
+soon blow out in the draught that is coming upon me; but this I will say
+to you: darker and darker grew the gloom between these brothers. When
+Giorsal Macdonald gave her love to Kenneth, Donnacha disappeared for a
+time. Then, one day, he came back to Borosay, an' smiled quietly with
+his cold eyes when they wondered at his coming again. Now, too, it was
+noticed that he no longer had an ill-will upon his brother, but spoke
+smoothly with him an' loved to be in his company. But to this day no one
+knows for sure what happened. For there was a gloaming when Donnacha Bàn
+came back alone in his sailing-boat. He an' Kenneth had sailed forth, he
+said, to shoot seals in the sea-arcades to the west of Rona, but in
+these dark and lonely passages they had missed each other. At last he
+had heard Kenneth's voice calling for help, but when he had got to the
+place it was too late, for his brother had been seized with the cramps,
+an' had sunk deep into the fathomless water. There is no getting a body
+again that sinks in these sea-galleries. The crabs know that.
+
+"Well, this and much more was what Donnacha Bàn told to his people. None
+believed him; but what could any do? There was no proof; none had ever
+seen them enter the sea-caves together. Not that Donnacha Bàn sought in
+any way to keep back those who would fain know more. Not so; he strove
+to help to find the body. Nevertheless, none believed; an' Giorsal nic
+Dugall Mòr least of all. The blight of that sorrow went to her heart.
+She had death soon, poor thing! but before the cold greyness was upon
+her she told her father, an' the minister that was there, that she knew
+Donnacha Bàn had murdered his brother. One might be saying these were
+the wild words of a woman; but, for sure, no one said that thing upon
+Borosay or Rona, or any of these isles. When all was done, the minister
+told what he knew, an' what he thought, to the Lord of the South Isles,
+and asked what was to be put upon Donnacha Bàn. 'Exile for ever,' said
+the chief, 'or if he stays here, the doom of silence. Let no man or
+woman speak to him or give him food or drink, or give him shelter, or
+let his shadow cross his or hers.'
+
+"When this thing was told to Donnacha Bàn Carmichael, he laughed at
+first; but as day after day slid over the rocks where all days fall, he
+laughed no more. Soon he saw that the chief's word was no empty word;
+an' yet would not go away from his own place. He could not stay upon
+Borosay, for his father cursed him; an' no man can stay upon the island
+where a father's curse moves this way an' that, for ever seeing him.
+Then, some say a madness came upon him, and others that he took wildness
+to be his way, and others that God put upon him the shadow of
+loneliness, so that he might meet sorrow there and repent. Howsoever
+that may be, Donnacha Bàn came to Rona, an' by the same token, it was
+the year of the great blight, when the potatoes and the corn came to
+naught, an' when the fish in the sea swam away from the isles. In the
+autumn of that year there was not a soul left on Rona except Giorsal an'
+the old man Ian, her father, who had guard of Caisteal-Rhona for him who
+was absent. When, once more, years after, smoke rose from the crofts,
+the saying spread that Donnacha Bàn, the murderer, had made his home
+among the caves of the upper part of the isle. None knew how this saying
+rose, for he was seen of none. The last man who saw him--an' that was a
+year later--was old Padruig M'Vurich the shepherd. Padruig said that, as
+he was driving his ewes across the north slope of Ben Einaval in the
+gloaming, he came upon a silent figure seated upon a rock, with his chin
+in his hands, an' his elbows on his knees--with the great, sad eyes of
+him staring at the moon that was lifting itself out of the sea. Padruig
+did not know who the man was. The shepherd had few wits, poor man! and
+he had known, or remembered, little about the story of Donnacha Bàn
+Carmichael; so when he spoke to the man, it was as to a stranger. The
+man looked at him and said--
+
+"'You are Padruig M'Vurich, the shepherd.'
+
+"At that a trembling was upon old Padruig, who had the wonder that this
+stranger should know who and what he was.
+
+"'And who will you be, and forgive the saying?' he asked.
+
+"'_Am Fàidh_--the Prophet,' the man said.
+
+"'And what prophet will you be, and what is your prophecy?' asked
+Padruig.
+
+"'I am here because I wait for what is to be, and that will be the
+coming of the Woman who is the Daughter of God.'
+
+"And with that the man said no more, an' the old shepherd went down
+through the gloaming, an', heavy with the thoughts that troubled him,
+followed his ewes down into Aonaig. But after that neither he nor any
+other saw or heard tell of the shadowy stranger; so that all upon Rona
+felt sure that Padruig had beheld no more than a vision. There were some
+who thought that he had seen the ghost of the outlaw Donnacha Bàn; an'
+mayhap one or two who wondered if the stranger that had said he was a
+prophet was not Donnacha Bàn himself, with a madness come upon him; but
+at last these sayings went out to sea upon the wind, an' men forgot.
+But, an' it was months and months afterwards, an' three days before his
+own death, old Padruig M'Vurich was sitting in the sunset on the rocky
+ledge in front of his brother's croft, where then he was staying, when
+he heard a strange crying of seals. He thought little of that; only,
+when he looked closer, he saw, in the hollow of the wave hard by that
+ledge, a drifting body.
+
+"'_Am Fàidh--Am Fàidh!_' he cried; 'the Prophet, the Prophet!'
+
+"At that his brother an' his brother's wife ran to see; but it was
+nothing that they saw. 'It would be a seal,' said Pòl M'Vurich; but at
+that Padruig had shook his head, an' said no for sure, he had seen the
+face of the dead man, an' it was of him whom he had met on the hillside,
+an' that had said he was the Prophet who was waiting there for the
+second coming of God.
+
+"And that is how there came about the echo of the thought that Donnacha
+Bàn had at last, after his madness, gone under the green wave and was
+dead. For all that, in the months which followed, more than one man said
+he had seen a figure high up on the hill. The old wisdom says that when
+God comes again, or the prophet who will come before, it will be as a
+herdsman on a lonely isle. More than one of the old people on Rona and
+Borosay remembered that _sgeul_ out of the _Seanachas_ that the
+tale-tellers knew. There were some who said that Donnacha Bàn had never
+been drowned at all, an' that he was this Prophet, this Herdsman. Others
+would not have that saying at all, but believed that the wraith was
+indeed Am Buachaill Ban, the Fair-haired Shepherd, who had come again
+to redeem the people out of their sorrow. There were even those who said
+that the Herdsman who haunted Rona was no other than Kenneth Carmichael
+himself, who had not died but had had the mind-dark there in the
+sea-caves where he had been lost, an' there had come to the knowledge of
+secret things, and so was at last Am Fàidh Chriosd."
+
+
+A great weakness came upon the old woman when she had spoken thus far.
+Ian feared that she would have breath for no further word; but after a
+thin gasping, and a listless fluttering of weak hands upon the coverlet,
+whereon her trembling fingers plucked aimlessly at the invisible
+blossoms of death, she opened her eyes once more, and stared in a dim
+questioning at him who sat by her bedside.
+
+"Tell me," whispered Ian, "tell me Marsail, what thought it is that is
+in your own mind?"
+
+But already the old woman had begun to wander.
+
+"For sure, for sure," she muttered, "_Am Fàidh ... Am Fàidh_ ... an' a
+child will be born ... the Queen of Heaven, an' ... that will be the
+voice of Domhuill, my husband, I am hearing ... an' dark it is, an' the
+tide comin' in ... an'----"
+
+Then, sure, the tide came in, and if in that darkness old Marsail Macrae
+heard any voice at all, it was that of Domhuill who years agone had sunk
+into the wild seas off the head of Barra.
+
+An hour later Alan walked slowly under the cloudy night. All he had
+heard from Ian came back to him with a strange familiarity. Something of
+this, at least, he had known before. Some hints of this mysterious
+Herdsman had reached his ears. In some inexplicable way his real or
+imaginary presence there upon Rona seemed a pre-ordained thing for him.
+
+He knew that the wild imaginings of the islanders had woven the legend
+of the Prophet, or of his mysterious message, out of the loom of the
+deep longing whereon is woven that larger tapestry, the shadow-thridden
+life of the island Gael. Laughter and tears, ordinary hopes and
+pleasures, and even joy itself, and bright gaiety, and the swift,
+spontaneous imaginations of susceptible natures--all this, of course, is
+to be found with the island Gael as with his fellows elsewhere. But
+every here and there are some who have in their minds the inheritance
+from the dim past of their race, and are oppressed as no other people
+are oppressed by the gloom of a strife between spiritual emotion and
+material facts. It is the brains of dreamers such as these which clear
+the mental life of the community; and it is in these brains are the
+mysterious looms which weave the tragic and sorrowful tapestries of
+Celtic thought. It were a madness to suppose that life in the isles
+consists of nothing but sadness and melancholy. It is not so, or need
+not be so, for the Gael is a creature of shadow and shine. But whatever
+the people is, the brain of the Gael hears a music that is sadder than
+any music there is, and has for its cloudy sky a gloom that shall not
+go; for the end is near, and upon the westernmost shores of these remote
+isles the voice of Celtic sorrow may be heard crying, "_Cha till, cha
+till, cha till mi tuille_": "I will return, I will return, I will return
+no more."
+
+Alan knew all this well; and yet he too dreamed his dream--that, even
+yet, there might be redemption for the people. He did not share the wild
+hope which some of the older islanders held, that Christ Himself shall
+come again to redeem an oppressed race; but might not another saviour
+arise, another redeeming spirit come into the world? And if so, might
+not that child of joy be born out of suffering and sorrow and crime; and
+if so, might not the Herdsman be indeed a prophet, the Prophet of the
+Woman in whom God should come anew as foretold?
+
+With startled eyes he crossed the thyme-set ledge whereon stood
+Caisteal-Rhona. Was it, after all, a message he had received, and was
+that which had appeared to him in that lonely cavern of the sea but a
+phantom of his own destiny? Was he himself, Alan Carmichael, indeed _Am
+Fàidh_, the predestined Prophet of the isles?
+
+
+V
+
+Ever since the night of Marsail's death, Ian had noticed that Alan no
+longer doubted, but that in some way a special message had come to him,
+a special revelation. On the other hand, he had himself swung further
+into his conviction that the vision he had seen in the cavern was, in
+truth, that of a living man. On Borosay, he knew, the fishermen believed
+that the _aonaran nan creag_, the recluse of the rocks, as commonly they
+spoke of him, was no other than Donnacha Bàn Carmichael, survived there
+through these many years, and long since mad with his loneliness and
+because of the burden of his crime.
+
+But by this time the islanders had come to see that Alan MacAilean was
+certainly not Donnacha Bàn. Even the startling likeness no longer
+betrayed them in this way. The ministers and the priests on Berneray and
+Barra scoffed at the whole story, and everywhere discouraged the idea
+that Donnacha Bàn could still be among the living. But for the common
+belief that to encounter the Herdsman, whether the lost soul of Donnacha
+Bàn or indeed the strange phantom of the hills of which the old legends
+spoke, was to meet inevitable disaster, the islanders might have been
+persuaded to make such a search among the caves of Rona as would almost
+certainly have revealed the presence of any who dwelt therein.
+
+But as summer lapsed into autumn, and autumn itself through its golden
+silences waned into the shadow of the equinox, a strange, brooding
+serenity came upon Alan. Ian himself now doubted his own vision of the
+mysterious Herdsman--if he indeed existed at all except in the
+imaginations of those who spoke of him either as the Buachaill Bàn, or
+as the _aonaran nan creag_. If a real man, Ian believed that at last he
+had passed away. None saw the Herdsman now; and even Morag MacNeill, who
+had often on moonlight nights been startled by the sound of a voice
+chanting among the upper solitudes, admitted that she now heard nothing
+unusual.
+
+St. Martin's summer came at last, and with it all that wonderful,
+dreamlike beauty which bathes the isles in a flood of golden light, and
+draws over sea and land a veil of deeper mystery.
+
+One late afternoon, Ian, returning to Caisteal-Rhona after an
+unexplained absence of several hours, found Alan sitting at a table.
+Spread before him were the sheets of one of the strange old Gaelic tales
+which he had ardently begun to translate. Alan lifted and slowly read
+the page or paraphrase which he had just laid down. It was after the
+homelier Gaelic of the _Eachdaireachd Challum mhic Cruimein_.
+
+"And when that king had come to the island, he lived there in the shadow
+of men's eyes; for none saw him by day or by night, and none knew whence
+he came or whither he fared; for his feet were shod with silence, and
+his way with dusk. But men knew that he was there, and all feared him.
+Months, even years, tramped one on the heels of the other, and perhaps
+the king gave no sign, but one day he would give a sign; and that sign
+was a laughing that was heard somewhere, upon the lonely hills, or on
+the lonely wave, or in the heart of him who heard. And whenever the king
+laughed, he who heard would fare ere long from his fellows to join that
+king in the shadow. But sometimes the king laughed only because of vain
+hopes and wild imaginings, for upon these he lives as well as upon the
+strange savours of mortality."
+
+That night Alan awakened Ian suddenly, and taking him by the hand made
+him promise to go with him on the morrow to the Teampull-Mara.
+
+In vain Ian questioned him as to why he asked this thing. All Alan would
+say was that he must go there once again, and with him, for he believed
+that a spirit out of heaven had come to reveal to him a wonder.
+Distressed by what he knew to be a madness, and fearful that it might
+prove to be no passing fantasy, Ian would fain have persuaded him
+against this intention. Even as he spoke, however, he realised that it
+might be better to accede to his wishes, and, above all, to be there
+with him, so that it might not be one only who heard or saw the expected
+revelation.
+
+And it was a strange faring indeed, that which occurred on the morrow.
+At noon, when the tide was an hour turned in the ebb, they sailed
+westward from Caisteal-Rhona. It was in silence they made that strange
+journey together; for, while Ian steered, Alan lay down in the hollow of
+the boat, with his head against the old man's knees, and slept, or at
+least lay still with his eyes closed.
+
+When at last they passed the headland and entered the first of the
+sea-arcades, Alan rose and sat beside him. Hauling down the now useless
+sail, Ian took an oar and, standing at the prow, urged the boat inward
+along the narrow corridor which led to the huge sea-cave of the Altar.
+
+In the deep gloom--for even on that day of golden light and beauty the
+green air of the sea-cave was heavy with shadow--there was a deathly
+chill. What dull light there was came from the sheen of the green water
+which lay motionless along the black basaltic ledges. When at last the
+base of the Altar was reached, Ian secured the boat by a rope passed
+around a projecting spur, and then seated himself in the stern beside
+Alan.
+
+"Tell me, Alan-a-ghaoil, what is this thing that you are thinking you
+will hear or see?"
+
+Alan looked at him strangely for a while, but, though his lips moved, he
+said nothing.
+
+"Tell me, my heart," Ian urged again, "who is it you expect to see or
+hear?"
+
+"_Am Buachaill Bàn_," Alan answered, "the Herdsman."
+
+For a moment Ian hesitated. Then, taking Alan's hand in his and raising
+it to his lips, he whispered in his ear--
+
+"There is no Herdsman upon Rona. If a man was there who lived solitary,
+the _aonaran nan creag_ is dead long since. What you have seen and heard
+has been a preying upon you of wild thoughts. Be thinking no more now of
+this vision."
+
+"This man," Alan answered quietly, "is not Donnacha Bàn, but the Prophet
+of whom the people speak. He himself has told me this thing. Yesterday I
+was here, and he bade me come again. He spoke out of the shadow that is
+about the Altar, though I saw him not. I asked him if he were Donnacha
+Bàn, and he said 'No.' I asked him if he were _Am Fàidh_, and he said
+'Yes.' I asked him if he were indeed an immortal spirit and herald of
+that which was to be, and he said 'Even so.'"
+
+For a long while after this no word was spoken. The chill of that remote
+place began to affect Alan, and he shivered slightly at times. But more
+he shivered because of the silence, and because that he who had promised
+to be there gave no sign. Sure, he thought, it could not be all a
+dream; sure, the Herdsman would come again.
+
+Then at last, turning to Ian, he said, "We must come on the morrow, for
+to-day he is not here."
+
+"I will do what you ask, Alan-mo-ghaol."
+
+But of a sudden Alan stepped on the black ledges at the base of the
+Altar, and slowly mounted the precipitous rock.
+
+Ian watched him till he became a shadow in that darkness. His heart
+leaped when suddenly he heard a cry fall out of the gloom.
+
+"Alan, Alan!" he cried, and a great fear was upon him when no answer
+came; but at last he heard him clambering slowly down the perilous slope
+of that obscure place. When he reached the ledge Alan stood still
+regarding him.
+
+"Why do you not come into the boat?" Ian asked, terrified because of
+what he saw in Alan's eyes.
+
+Alan looked at him with parted lips, his breath coming and going like
+that of a caged bird.
+
+"What is it?" Ian whispered.
+
+"Ian, when I reached the top of the Altar, and in the dim light that was
+there, I saw the dead body of a man lying upon the rock. His head was
+lain back so that the gleam from a crevice in the cliff overhead fell
+upon it. The man had been dead many hours. He is a man whose hair has
+been greyed by years and sorrow, but the man is he who is of my blood;
+he whom I resemble so closely; he that the fishermen call the hermit of
+the rocks; he that is the Herdsman."
+
+Ian stared, with moving lips: then in a whisper he spoke--
+
+"Would you be for following a herdsman who could lead you to no fold?
+This man is dead, Alan mac Alasdair; and it is well that you brought me
+here to-day. That is a good thing, and for sure God has willed it."
+
+"It is not a man that is dead. It is my soul that lies there. It is
+dead. God called me to be His Prophet, and I hid in dreams. It is the
+end." And with that, and death staring out of his eyes, he entered the
+boat and sat down beside Ian.
+
+"Let us go," he said, and that was all.
+
+Slowly Ian oared the boat across the shadowy gulf of the cave, along the
+narrow passage, and into the pale green gloom of the outer cavern,
+wherein the sound of the sea made a forlorn requiem in his ears.
+
+But the short November day was already passing to its end. All the sea
+westward was aflame with gold and crimson light, and in the great dome
+of the sky a wonderful radiance lifted above the paleness of the clouds,
+whose pinnacled and bastioned heights towered in the south-west.
+
+A faint wind blew eastwardly. Raising the sail, Ian made it fast and
+then sat down beside Alan. But he, rising, moved along the boat to the
+mast, and leaned there with his face against the setting sun.
+
+Idly they drifted onward. Deep silence lay between them; deep silence
+was all about them, save for the ceaseless, inarticulate murmur of the
+sea, the splash of low waves against the rocks of Rona, and the sigh of
+the surf at the base of the basalt precipices.
+
+And this was their homeward sailing on that day of revelation: Alan,
+with his back against the mast, and his lifeless face irradiated by the
+light of the setting sun; Ian, steering, with his face in shadow.
+
+  _Love in Shadow has two sacred ministers, Oblivion and Faith, one to
+  heal, the other to renovate and upbuild._--F. M.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[13] This hymn was taken down in the Gaelic and translated by Mr.
+Alexander Carmichael of South Uist.
+
+
+
+
+FRAGMENTS FROM "GREEN FIRE"
+
+
+THE BIRDS OF ANGUS ÒG
+
+  "_Then, in the violet forest all a-bourgeon, Eucharis, said to me:
+  It is Spring_."--ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
+
+After the dim purple bloom of a suspended Spring, a green rhythm ran
+from larch to thorn, from lime to sycamore: spread from meadow to
+meadow, from copse to copse, from hedgerow to hedgerow. The blackthorn
+had already snowed upon the nettle-garths. In the obvious nests, among
+the bare boughs of ash and beech, the eggs of the blackbird were
+blue-green as the sky that March had bequeathed to April. For days past,
+when the breath of the Equinox had surged out of the west, the
+missel-thrushes had bugled from the wind-swayed topmost branches of the
+tallest elms. Everywhere the green rhythm ran.
+
+In every leaf that had uncurled there was a delicate bloom, that which
+is upon all things in the first hours of life. The spires of the grass
+were washed in a green, dewy light. Out of the brown earth a myriad
+living things thrust tiny green shafts, arrow-heads, bulbs, spheres,
+clusters. Along the pregnant soil keener ears than ours would have heard
+the stir of new life, the innumerous whisper of the bursting seed: and,
+in the wind itself, shepherding the shadow-chased sunbeams, the voice of
+that vernal gladness which has been man's clarion since Time began.
+
+Day by day the wind-wings lifted a more multitudinous whisper from the
+woodlands. The deep hyperborean note, from the invisible ocean of air,
+was still audible: within the concourse of bare boughs which wrought
+against it, that surging voice could not but have an echo of its wintry
+roar. In the sun-havens, however, along the southerly copses, in daisied
+garths of orchard-trees, amid the flowering currant and guelder and
+lilac bushes, in quiet places where the hives were all a-murmur, the
+wind already sang its lilt of Spring. From dawn till noon, from an hour
+before sundown till the breaking foam along the wild-cherry flushed
+fugitively because of the crimson glow out of the west, there was a
+ceaseless chittering of birds. The starlings and the sparrows enjoyed
+the commune of the homestead; the larks and fieldfares and green and
+yellow linnets congregated in the meadows, where, too, the wild bee
+already roved. Among the brown ridgy fallows there was a constant
+flutter of black, white-gleaming, and silver-grey wings, where the
+stalking rooks, the jerking peewits, and the wary, uncertain gulls from
+the neighbouring sea feasted tirelessly from the teeming earth. Often,
+too, the wind-hover, that harbinger of the season of the young broods,
+quivered his curved wings in his arrested flight, while his lance-like
+gaze penetrated the whins beneath which a new-born rabbit crawled, or
+discerned in the tangle of a grassy tuft the brown watchful eyes of a
+nesting quail.
+
+In the remoter woodlands the three foresters of April could be heard;
+the woodpecker tapping on the gnarled boles of the oaks, the wild dove
+calling in low crooning monotones to his silent mate, the cuckoo tolling
+his infrequent peals from skiey belfries built of sun and mist.
+
+In the fields, where the thorns were green as rivulets of melted snow
+and the grass had the bloom of emerald, and the leaves of docken,
+clover, cinquefoil, sorrel, and a thousand plants and flowers, were
+wave-green, the ewes lay, idly watching with their luminous amber eyes
+the frisking and leaping of the close-curled, tuft-tailed, woolly-legged
+lambs. In corners of the hedgerows, and in hollows in the rolling
+meadows, the primrose, the celandine, the buttercup, the dandelion, and
+the daffodil spilled little eddies of the sunflood which overbrimmed
+them with light. All day long the rapture of the larks filled the blue
+air with vanishing spirals of music, swift and passionate in the ascent,
+repetitive and less piercing in the narrowing downward gyres. From every
+whin the poignant monotonous note of the yellow hammer re-echoed. Each
+pastoral hedge was alive with robins, chaffinches, and the dusky shadows
+of the wild mice darting here and there among the greening boughs.
+
+Whenever this green fire is come upon the earth, the swift contagion
+spreads to the human heart. What the seedlings feel in the trees, what
+the blood feels in the brown mould, what the sap feels in every creature
+from the newt in the pool to the nesting bird, so feels the strange
+remembering ichor that runs its red tides through human hearts and
+brains. Spring has its subtler magic for us, because of the dim
+mysteries of unremembering remembrance and of the vague radiances of
+hope. Something in us sings an ascendant song, and we expect we know not
+what: something in us sings a decrescent song, and we realise vaguely
+the stirring of immemorial memories.
+
+There is none who will admit that Spring is fairer elsewhere than in his
+own land. But there are regions where the season is so hauntingly
+beautiful that it would seem as though Angus Òg knew them for his chosen
+resting-places in his green journey.
+
+Angus Òg, Angus MacGreigne, Angus the Ever Youthful, the Son of the Sun,
+a fair god he indeed, golden-haired and wonderful as Apollo Chrusokumos.
+Some say that he is Love: some, that he is Spring: some, even, that in
+him Thanatos, the Hellenic Celt that was his far-off kin, is
+reincarnate. But why seek riddles in flowing water? It may well be that
+Angus Òg is Love, and Spring, and Death. The elemental gods are ever
+triune: and in the human heart, in whose lost Eden an ancient tree of
+knowledge grows, wherefrom the mind has not yet gathered more than a few
+windfalls, it is surely sooth that Death and Love are oftentimes one and
+the same, and that they love to come to us in the apparel of Spring.
+
+Sure, indeed, Angus Òg is a name above all sweet to lovers, for is he
+not the god--the fair Youth of the Tuatha-de-Danann, the Ancient People,
+with us still, though for ages seen of us no more--from the meeting of
+whose lips are born white birds, which fly abroad and nest in lovers'
+hearts till the moment come when, on the yearning lips of love, their
+invisible wings shall become kisses again?
+
+Then, too, there is the old legend that Angus goes to and fro upon the
+world, a weaver of rainbows. He follows the Spring, or is its herald.
+Often his rainbows are seen in the heavens: often in the rapt gaze of
+love. We have all perceived them in the eyes of children, and some of us
+have discerned them in the hearts of sorrowful women, and in the dim
+brains of the old. Ah, for sure, if Angus Og be the lovely Weaver of
+Hope, he is deathless comrade of the Spring, and we may well pray to him
+to let his green fire move in our veins; whether he be but the Eternal
+Youth of the World, or be also Love, whose soul is youth; or even though
+he be likewise Death himself, Death to whom Love was wedded long, long
+ago.
+
+
+II
+
+Alan was a poet, and to dream was his birthright.... He was ever
+occupied by that wonderful past of his race which was to him a living
+reality. It was perhaps because he so keenly perceived the romance of
+the present--the romance of the general hour, of the individual
+moment--that he turned so insatiably to the past with its deathless
+charm, its haunting appeal.... His mind was as irresistibly drawn to the
+Celtic world of the past as the swallow to the sun-way. In a word he was
+not only a poet but a Celtic poet; and not only a Celtic poet but a
+dreamer of the Celtic dream. Perhaps this was because of the double
+strain in his veins. Doubtless, too, it was continuously enhanced by his
+intimate knowledge of two of the Celtic languages, that of the Breton
+and that of the Gael. It is language that is the surest stimulus to the
+remembering nerves. We have a memory within memory as layers of skin
+underlie the epidermis. With most of us this anterior remembrance
+remains dormant throughout life: but to some are given swift ancestral
+recollections. Alan was of these.
+
+With this double key Alan unlocked many doors. In his brain ran ever
+that Ossianic tide which has borne so many marvellous argosies through
+the troubled waters of the modern mind. Old ballad of his nature isles,
+with their haunting Gaelic rhythm of idioms, their frequent reminiscence
+of Norse viking and the Danish summer-sailor were often in his ears. He
+had lived with his hero Cuchullin from the days when the boy shewed his
+royal blood at Emain-Macha till that sad hour when his madness came upon
+him and he died. He had fared forth with many a Lifting of the Sunbeam,
+and had followed Oisin step by step on that last melancholy journey when
+Malvina led the blind old man along the lonely shores of Arran. He had
+watched the _crann-tara_ flare from glen to glen, and at the bidding of
+that fiery cross he had seen the whirling of the swords, the dusky
+flight of arrow-rain, and from the isles, the leaping forth of the war
+_birlinns_ to meet the Viking galleys. How often, too, he had followed
+trial of Niall of the nine Hostages and had seen the Irish Charlemagne
+ride victor through Saxon London, or across the Norman plains or with
+onward sword direct his army against the white walls of the Alps!... It
+was all this marvellous life of old which wrought upon Alan's life as by
+a spell. Often he recalled the words of a Gaelic _Sean_ he had heard
+Yann croon in his soft monotonous voice,--words which made a light
+shoreward eddy of the present and were solemn with the deep-sea sound of
+the past, that is with us even as we speak....
+
+Truly his soul must have lived a thousand years ago. In him, at least,
+the old Celtic brain was reborn with a vivid intensity which none
+guessed, for Alan himself only vaguely surmised the extent and depth of
+this obsession. In heart and brain that old world lived anew. Himself a
+poet, all that was fair and tragically beautiful was for ever undergoing
+in his mind a marvellous transformation--a magical resurrection rather,
+wherein what was remote and bygone, and crowned with oblivious dust,
+became alive again with intense and beautiful life....
+
+
+Deep passion instinctively moves towards the shadow rather than towards
+the golden noons of light. Passion hears what love at most dreams of;
+passion sees what love mayhap dimly discerns in a glass darkly. A
+million of our fellows are "in love" at any or every moment: and for
+these the shadowy way is intolerable. But for the few, in whom love is,
+the eyes are circumspect against the dark hour which comes when heart
+and brain and blood are aflame with the paramount ecstasy of love....
+
+Oh, flame that burns where fires of home are lit! and oh, flame that
+burns in the heart to whom life has not said, Awake! and oh, flame that
+smoulders from death to life, and from life to death, in the dumb lives
+of those to whom the primrose way is closed! Everywhere the burning of
+the burning, the flame of the flame, pain and the shadow of pain, joy
+and the rapt breath of joy, flame of the flame that, burning, destroyeth
+not, till the flame is no more!...
+
+
+It is said of an ancient poet of the Druid days that he had the power to
+see the lines of the living, and these as though they were phantoms,
+separate from the body. Was there not a young king of Albainn who, in a
+perilous hour, discovered the secret of old time, and knew how a life
+may be hidden away from the body so that none may know of it, save the
+wind that whispers all things, and the tides of day and night that bear
+all things upon their dark flood?...
+
+The fragrance of the forest intoxicated him. Spring was come indeed. The
+wild storm had ruined nothing, for at its fiercest it had swept
+overhead. Everywhere the green fire of Spring would be litten anew. A
+green flame would pass from meadow to hedgerow, from hedgerow to the
+tangled thickets of bramble and dog-rose, from the underwoods to the
+inmost forest glades.
+
+Everywhere song would be to the birds, everywhere young life would
+pulse, everywhere the rhythm of a new rapture would run rejoicing. The
+Miracle of Spring would be accomplished in the sight of all men, of all
+birds and beasts, of all green life. Each, in its kind would have a
+swifter throb in the red blood of the vivid sap....
+
+She was his Magic. The light of their love was upon everything. Deeply
+as he loved beauty he had learned to love it far more keenly and
+understandingly because of her. He saw now through the accidental and
+everywhere discerned the Eternal Beauty, the echoes of whose wandering
+are in every heart and brain though few discern the white vision or hear
+the haunting voice.... Thus it was she had for him this immutable
+attraction which a few women have for a few men; an appeal, a charm,
+that atmosphere of romance, that _air_ of ideal beauty, wherein lies the
+secret of all passionate art.
+
+The world without wonder, the world without mystery! That indeed is the
+rainbow without colours, the sunrise without living gold, the noon void
+of light....
+
+In deep love there is no height nor depth between two hearts, no height
+nor depth nor length nor breadth. There is simply love. What if both at
+times were wrought too deeply by this beautiful dream? What if the inner
+life triumphed now and then, and each forgot the deepest instinct of
+life that here the body is overlord, and the soul but a divine consort?
+
+
+There are three races of man. There is the myriad race which loses all
+through (not bestiality, for the brute world is clean and sane)
+perverted animalism; and there is the myriad race which denounces
+humanity, and pins all its faith and joy to a life the very conditions
+of whose existence are incompatible with the law to which we are
+subject--the sole law, the law of nature.
+
+Then there is that small untoward clan, which knows the divine call of
+the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the
+heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of
+hope upon our human horizons, which hears and sees, and yet turns
+wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part,
+to the common kindred of living things with which we are at one--is
+content, in a word, to live because of the dream that makes living so
+mysteriously sweet and poignant; and to dream because of the commanding
+immediacy of life....
+
+What are dreams but the dust of wayfaring thoughts? Or whence are they,
+and what air is upon their shadowy wings? Do they come out of the
+twilight of man's mind: are they ghosts of exiles from vanished palaces
+of the brain: or are they heralds with proclamations of hidden tidings
+for the soul that dreams?
+
+
+III
+
+THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD
+
+  "_The Souls of the Living are the Beauty of the World._"--BACON.
+
+For out of his thoughts about Annaik and Ynys arose a fuller, a deeper
+conception of womanhood. How well he remembered a legend that Ynys had
+once told him: a legend of a fair spirit which goes to and fro upon the
+world, the Weaver of Tears. He loves the pathways of sorrow. His voice
+is low and sweet, with a sound like the bubbling of waters in that fount
+whence the rainbows rise. His eyes are in quiet places, and in the dumb
+pain of animals as in the agony of the human brain: but most he is
+found, oftenest are the dewy traces of his feet, in the heart of woman.
+
+Tears, tears: they are not the saltest tears which are on the lids of
+those who weep. Fierce tears there are, hot founts of pain in the mind
+of many a man, that are never shed, but slowly crystallise in furrows on
+brow and face, and in deep weariness in the eyes: fierce tears,
+unquenchable, in the heart of many a woman, whose brave eyes look
+fearlessly at life, whose dauntless courage goes forth daily to die but
+never to be vanquished.
+
+In truth the Weaver of Tears abides in the heart of woman. O Mother of
+Pity, of Love, of deep Compassion: with thee it is to yearn for ever for
+the ideal human, to bring the spiritual love into fashion with human
+desire, endlessly to strive, endlessly to fail, always to hope in spite
+of disillusion, to love unswervingly against all baffling and
+misunderstanding, and even forgetfulness! O Woman, whose eyes are always
+stretched out to her erring children, whose heart is big enough to cover
+all the little children in the world, and suffer with their sufferings,
+and joy with their joys: Woman, whose other divine names are Strength
+and Patience, who is no girl, no virgin, because she has drunk too
+deeply of the fount of Life to be very young or very joyful. Upon her
+lips is the shadowy kiss of death: in her eyes is the shadow of birth.
+She is the veiled interpreter of the two mysteries. Yet what joyousness
+like hers, when she wills: because of her unwavering hope, her
+inexhaustible fount of love?
+
+So it was that just as Alan had long recognised as a deep truth, how the
+spiritual nature of man has been revealed to humanity in many divine
+incarnations, so he had come to believe that the spiritual nature of
+woman has been revealed in the many Marys, sisters of the Beloved, who
+have had the keys of the soul and the heart in their unconscious
+keeping. In this exquisite truth he knew a fresh and vivid hope.... A
+Woman-Saviour, who would come near to all of us, because in her heart
+would be the blind tears of the child, the bitter tears of the man, and
+the patient tears of the woman: who would be the Compassionate One, with
+no end or aim but compassion--with no doctrine to teach, no way to show,
+but only deep, wonderful, beautiful, inalienable, unquenchable
+compassion.
+
+For in truth there is the divine eternal feminine counterpart to the
+divine eternal male, and both are needed to explain the mystery of the
+dual spirit within us--the mystery of the two in one, so infinitely
+stranger and more wonderful than that triune life which the blind
+teachers of the blind have made a rock of stumbling and offence out of a
+truth clear and obvious as noon.
+
+We speak of Mother Nature, but we do not discern the living truth behind
+our words. How few of us have the vision of this great brooding Mother,
+whose garment is the earth and sea, whose head is pillowed among the
+stars: she, who, with death and sleep as her familiar shapes, soothes
+and rests all the weariness of the world, from the waning leaf to the
+beating pulse, from the brief span of a human heart to the furrowing of
+granite brows by the uninterrupted sun, the hounds of rain and wind, and
+the untrammelled airs of heaven.
+
+Not cruel, relentless, impotently anarchic, chaotically potent, this
+Mater Genetrix. We see her thus, who are flying threads in the loom she
+weaves. But she is patient, abiding, certain, inviolate, and silent
+ever. It is only when we come to this vision of her whom we call Isis,
+or Hera, or Orchil, or one of a hundred other names, our unknown
+Earth-Mother, that men and women will know each other aright, and go
+hand in hand along the road of life without striving to crush, to
+subdue, to usurp, to retaliate, to separate.
+
+Ah, fair vision of humanity to come: man and woman side by side, sweet,
+serene, true, simple, natural, fulfilling earth's and heaven's behests,
+unashamed, unsophisticated, unaffected, each to each and for each,
+children of one mother, inheritors of a like destiny, and, at the last,
+artificers of an equal fate.
+
+Pondering thus, Alan rose, and looked out, into the night. In that
+great stillness, wherein the moonlight lay like the visible fragrance of
+the earth, he gazed long and intently. How shadow, now, were those lives
+that had so lately palpitated in this very place: how strange their
+silence, their incommunicable knowledge, their fathomless peace!
+
+Was it all lost ... the long endurance of pain, the pangs of sorrow? If
+so, what was the lesson of life? Surely to live with sweet serenity and
+gladness, content against the inevitable hour. There is solace of a kind
+in the idea of a common end, of that terrible processional march of life
+wherein the myriad is momentary, and the immeasurable is but a passing
+shadow. But, alas, it is only solace of a kind: for what heart that has
+beat to the pulse of love can relinquish the sweet dream of life, and
+what coronal can philosophy put upon the brows of youth in place of
+eternity.
+
+No, no: of this he felt sure. In the Beauty of the World lies the
+ultimate redemption of our mortality. When we shall become at one with
+nature in a sense profounder even than the poetic imaginings of most of
+us, we shall understand what now we fail to discern. The arrogance of
+those who would have the stars as candles for our night, and the
+universe as a pleasance for our thought, will be as impossible as their
+blind fatuity who say we are of dust, briefly vitalised, that shall be
+dust again, with no fragrance saved from the rude bankruptcy of life, no
+beauty raised up against the sun to bloom anew.
+
+It is no idle dream, this: no idle dream that we are a perishing clan
+among the sons of God, because of this slow waning of our joy, of our
+passionate delight, in the Beauty of the World. We have been unable to
+look out upon the shining of our star, for the vision overcomes us; and
+we have used veils which we call "scenery," "picturesqueness," and the
+like--poor, barren words that are so voiceless and remote before the
+rustle of leaves and the lap of water, before the ancient music of the
+wind, and all the sovran eloquence of the tides of light. But a day may
+come--nay, shall surely come--when indeed the poor and the humble shall
+inherit the earth: they who have not made a league with temporal evils
+and out of whose heart shall arise the deep longing, that shall become
+universal, of the renewal of youth.
+
+
+... Often, too, alone in his observatory, where he was wont to spend
+much of his time, Alan knew that strange nostalgia of the mind for
+impossible things. Then, wrought for a while from his vision of green
+life, and flamed by another green fire than that born of the earth, he
+dreamed his dream. With him, the peopled solitude of night was a
+concourse of confirming voices. He did not dread the silence of the
+stars, the cold remoteness of the stellar fire.
+
+In that other watch-tower in Paris, where he had spent the best hours of
+his youth, he had loved that nightly watch on the constellations. Now,
+as then, in the pulse of the planets he found assurances which faith had
+not given him. In the vast majestic order of that nocturnal march, that
+diurnal retreat, he had learned the law of the whirling leaf and the
+falling star, of the slow æon-delayed comet and of the slower wane of
+solar fires. Looking with visionary eyes into that congregation of
+stars, he realised, not the littleness of the human dream, but its
+divine impulsion. It was only when, after long vigils into the quietudes
+of night, he turned his gaze from the palaces of the unknown, and
+thought of the baffled fretful swarming in the cities of men, that his
+soul rose in revolt against the sublime ineptitude of man's spiritual
+leaguer against destiny.
+
+Destiny--"An Dan"--it was a word familiar to him since childhood, when
+first he had heard it on the lips of old Ian Macdonald. And once, on the
+eve of the Feast of Paschal, when Alan had asked Daniel Dare what was
+the word which the stars spelled from zenith to nadir, the Astronomer
+had turned and answered simply, "_C'est le Destin_."
+
+But Alan was of the few to whom this talismanic word opens lofty
+perspectives, even while it obscures those paltry vistas which we deem
+unending and dignify with vain hopes and void immortalities.
+
+  _To live in Beauty is to sum up in four words all the spiritual
+  aspiration of the soul of man._--F. M.
+
+
+
+
+A DREAM
+
+_To G. R. S. MEAD_
+
+
+  _Our thought, our consciousness, is but the scintillation of a wave:
+  below us is a moving shadow, our brief forecast and receding way;
+  beneath the shadow are depths sinking into depths, and then the
+  unfathomable unknown._--F. M.
+
+
+
+
+A Dream
+
+
+I was on a vast, an illimitable plain, where the dark blue horizons were
+sharp as the edges of hills. It was the world, but there was nothing in
+the world. There was not a blade of grass nor the hum of an insect, nor
+the shadow of a bird's wing. The mountains had sunk like waves in the
+sea when there is no wind; the barren hills had become dust. Forests had
+become the fallen leaf; and the leaf had passed. I was aware of one who
+stood beside me, though that knowledge was of the spirit only; and my
+eyes were filled with the same nothingness as I beheld above and beneath
+and beyond. I would have thought I was in the last empty glens of Death,
+were it not for a strange and terrible sound that I took to be the voice
+of the wind coming out of nothing, travelling over nothingness and
+moving onward into nothing.
+
+"There is only the wind," I said to myself in a whisper.
+
+Then the voice of the dark Power beside me, whom in my heart I knew to
+be Dalua, the Master of Illusions, said: "Verily, this is your last
+illusion."
+
+I answered: "It is the wind."
+
+And the voice answered: "That is not the wind that you hear, for the
+wind is dead. It is the empty, hollow echo of my laughter."
+
+Then, suddenly, he who was beside me lifted up a small stone, smooth as
+a pebble of the sea. It was grey and flat, and yet to me had a terrible
+beauty because it was the last vestige of the life of the world.
+
+The Presence beside me lifted up the stone and said: "It is the end."
+
+And the horizons of the world came in upon me like a rippling shadow.
+And I leaned over darkness and saw whirling stars. These were gathered
+up like leaves blown from a tree, and in a moment their lights were
+quenched, and they were further from me than grains of sand blown on a
+whirlwind of a thousand years.
+
+Then he, that terrible one, Master of Illusions, let fall the stone, and
+it sank into the abyss and fell immeasurably into the infinite. And
+under my feet the world was as a falling wave, and was not. And I fell,
+though without sound, without motion. And for years and years I fell
+below the dim waning of light; and for years and years I fell through
+universes of dusk; and for years and years and years I fell through the
+enclosing deeps of darkness. It was to me as though I fell for
+centuries, for æons, for unimaginable time. I knew I had fallen beyond
+time, and that I inhabited eternity, where were neither height, nor
+depth, nor width, nor space.
+
+But, suddenly, without sound, without motion, I stood steadfast upon a
+vast ledge. Before me, on that ledge of darkness become rock, I saw this
+stone which had been lifted from the world of which I was a shadow,
+after shadow itself had died away. And as I looked, this stone became
+fire and rose in flame. Then the flame was not. And when I looked the
+stone was water; it was as a pool that did not overflow, a wave that did
+not rise or fall, a shaken mirror wherein nothing was troubled.
+
+Then, as dew is gathered in silence, the water was without form or
+colour or motion. And the stone seemed to me like a handful of earth
+held idly in the poise of unseen worlds. What I thought was a green
+flame rose from it, and I saw that it had the greenness of grass, and
+had the mystery of life. The green herb passed as green grass in a
+drought; and I saw the waving of wings. And I saw shape upon shape, and
+image upon image, and symbol upon symbol. Then I saw a man, and he,
+too, passed; and I saw a woman, and she, too, passed; and I saw a child,
+and the child passed. Then the stone was a Spirit. And it shone there
+like a lamp. And I fell backward through deeps of darkness, through
+unimaginable time.
+
+And when I stood upon the world again it was like a glory. And I saw the
+stone lying at my feet.
+
+And One said: "Do you not know me, brother?"
+
+And I said: "Speak, Lord."
+
+And Christ stooped and kissed me upon the brow.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+  _Unity does not lie in the emotional life of expression which we
+  call Art, which discerns it; it does not lie in nature, but in the
+  Soul of man._--F. M.
+
+
+
+
+Notes to First Edition
+
+THE DIVINE ADVENTURE
+
+
+When "The Divine Adventure" appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ in
+November and December last, I received many comments and letters. From
+these I infer that my present readers will also be of two sections,
+those who understand at once why, in this symbolical presentment, I
+ignore the allegorical method--and those who, accustomed to the
+artificial method of allegory, would rather see this "story of a soul"
+told in that method, without actuality, or as an ordinary essay stript
+of narrative.
+
+But each can have only his own way of travelling towards a desired goal.
+I chose my way, because in no other, as it seemed to me, could I convey
+what I wanted to convey. Is it so great an effort of the imagination to
+conceive of the Mind and Soul actual as the Body is actual? And is there
+any tragic issue so momentous, among all the tragic issues of life, as
+the problem of the Spirit, the Mind--the Will as I call it; that
+problem as to whether it has to share the assured destiny of the Body,
+or the desired and possible destiny of the Soul? There is no spiritual
+tragedy so poignant as this uncertainty of the Will, the Spirit, what we
+call the thinking part of us, before the occult word of the Soul,
+inhabiting here but as an impatient exile, and the inevitable end of
+that Body to which it is so intimately allied, with which are its
+immediate, and in a sense its most vital interests, and in whose
+mortality it would seem to have a dreadful share.
+
+The symbolist, unlike the allegorist, cannot disregard the actual, the
+reality as it seems: he must, indeed, be supremely heedful of this
+reality as it seems. The symbolist or the mystic (properly they are one)
+abhors the vague, what is called the "mystical": he is supremely a
+realist, but his realism is of the spirit and the imagination, and not
+of externals, or rather not of these merely, for there, too, he will not
+disregard actuality, but make it his base, as the lark touches the solid
+earth before it rises where it can see both Earth and Heaven and sing a
+song that partakes of each and belongs to both. "In the kingdom of the
+imagination the ideal must ever be faithful to the general laws of
+nature," wrote one of the wisest of mystics. Art is pellucid mystery,
+and the only spiritually logical interpretation of life; and her
+inevitable language is Symbol--by which (whether in colour, or form, or
+sound, or word, or however the symbol be translated) a spiritual image
+illumines a reality that the material fact narrows or obscures.
+
+For the rest, "The Divine Adventure" is an effort to solve, or obtain
+light upon, the profoundest human problem. It is by looking inward that
+we shall find the way outward. The gods--and what we mean by the
+gods--the gods seeking God have ever penetrated the soul by two roads,
+that of nature and that of art. Edward Calvert put it supremely well
+when he said "I go inward to God: outward to the gods." It was Calvert
+also who wrote:--
+
+"To charm the truthfulness of eternal law into a guise which it has not
+had before, and clothe the invention with expression, this is the magic
+with which the poet would lead the listener into a world of his own, and
+make him sit down in the charmed circle of his own gods."
+
+
+_Page 96. The Félire na Naomh Nerennach_ (so spelt, more phonetically
+than correctly) is an invaluable early "Chronicle of Irish Saints."
+Uladh--or Ulla--is the Gaelic for Ulster, though the ancient boundaries
+were not the same as those of the modern province; and at periods Uladh
+stood for all North Ireland. Tara in the south was first the capital of
+a kingdom, and later the federal capital. Thus, at the beginning of the
+Christian era, Concobar mac Nessa was both King of the Ultonians (the
+clans of Uladh) and Ard-Righ or High-King of Ireland, a nominal
+suzerainty.
+
+The name of Mochaoi's abbacy, _n' Aondruim_, was in time anglicised to
+Antrim.
+
+The characteristic Gaelic passage quoted in English at p. 98 is not from
+the _Félire na Naomh Nerennach_, but from a Hebridean source: excerpted
+from one of the many treasures-troves rescued from extant or recently
+extant Gaelic lore by Mr. Alexander Carmichael, all soon to be published
+(the outcome of a long life of unselfish devotion) under the title _Or
+agus Ob_, though we may be sure that there will be little "dross" and
+much "gold."
+
+
+_Page 101._ The allusion is to the story or sketch called "The Book of
+the Opal" in _The Dominion of Dreams_: a sketch true in essentials, but
+having at its close an arbitrary interpolation of external symbolism
+which I now regret as superfluous. I have since realised that the only
+living and convincing symbol is that which is conceived of the spirit
+and not imagined by the mind. My friend's life, and end, were strange
+enough--and significant enough--without the effort to bring home to
+other minds by an arbitrary formula what should have been implicit.
+
+
+_Page 102._ I have again and again, directly or indirectly, since my
+first book _Pharais_ to the repeated record in this book, alluded to
+Seumas Macleod; and as I have shown in "Barabal," here, and in the
+dedication to this book, it is to the old islander and to my Hebridean
+nurse, Barabal, that I owe more than to any other early influences. For
+those who do not understand the character of the Island-Gael, or do not
+realise that all Scotland is not Presbyterian, it may be as well to add
+that many of the islesmen are of the Catholic faith (broadly, the
+Southern Hebrides are wholly Catholic), and that therefore the brooding
+imagination of an old islander--who spoke Gaelic only, and had never
+visited the mainland--might the more readily dwell upon Mary the Mother:
+Mary of the Lamb, Mary the Shepherdess, as she is lovingly called. I do
+not, for private reasons, name the island where he lived: but I have
+written of him, or of what he said, nothing but what was so, or was thus
+said. He had suffered much, and was lonely: but was, I think, the
+happiest, and, I am sure, the wisest human being I have known. What I
+cannot now recall is whether his belief in Mary's Advent was based on an
+old prophecy, or upon a faith of his own dreams and visions, coloured by
+the visions and dreams of a like mind and longing: perhaps, and
+likeliest, upon both. I was not more than seven years old when that
+happened of which I have written on p. 102, and so recall with surety
+only that which I saw and heard.
+
+I am glad to know that another is hardly less indebted to old Seumas
+Macleod. I am not permitted to mention his name, but a friend and
+kinsman allows me to tell this: that when he was about sixteen he was on
+the remote island where Seumas lived, and on the morrow of his visit
+came at sunrise upon the old man, standing looking seaward with his
+bonnet removed from his long white locks; and upon his speaking to
+Seumas (when he saw he was not "at his prayers") was answered, in Gaelic
+of course, "Every morning like this I take off my hat to the beauty of
+the world."
+
+The untaught islander who could say this had learned an ancient wisdom,
+of more account than wise books, than many philosophies.
+
+Let me tell one other story of him, which I have meant often to tell,
+but have as often forgotten. He had gone once to the Long Island, with
+three fishermen, in their herring-coble. The fish had been sold, and the
+boat had sailed southward to a Lews haven where Seumas had a relative.
+The younger men had "hanselled" their good bargain overwell, and were
+laughing and talking freely, as they walked up the white road from the
+haven. Something was said that displeased Seumas greatly, and he might
+have spoken swiftly in reproof; but just then a little naked child ran
+laughing from a cottage, chased by his smiling mother. Seumas caught up
+the child, who was but an infant, and set him in their midst, and then
+kneeled and said the few words of a Hebridean hymn beginning:--
+
+    "Even as a little child
+      Most holy, pure...."
+
+No more was said, but the young men understood; and he who long
+afterward told me of this episode added that though he had often since
+acted weakly and spoken foolishly, he had never, since that day, uttered
+foul words. Another like characteristic anecdote of Seumas (as the
+skipper who made his men cease mocking a "fool") I have told in the tale
+called "The Amadan" in the _The Dominion of Dreams_.
+
+I could write much of this revered friend--so shrewd and genial and
+worldly-wise, for all his lonely life; so blithe in spirit and swiftly
+humorous; himself a poet, and remembering countless songs and tales of
+old; strong and daring, on occasion; good with the pipes, as with the
+nets; seldom angered, but then with a fierce anger, barbaric in its
+vehemence; a loyal clansman; in all things, good and not so good, a Gael
+of the Isles.
+
+But since I have not done so, not gathered into one place, I add this
+note.
+
+
+_Page 113._ The kingdom of the Suderöer (_i.e._ Southern Isles) was the
+Norse name for the realm of the Hebrides and Inner Hebrides when the
+Isles were under Scandinavian dominion.
+
+
+_Page 118._ The ignorance or supineness which characterises so many
+English writers on Celtic history is to be found even among Highland
+and Irish clerics and others who have not taken the trouble to study or
+even become acquainted with their own ancient literature, but fallen
+into the foolish and discreditable conventionalism which maintains that
+before Columban or in pre-Christian days the Celtic race consisted of
+wholly uncivilised and broken tribes, rivals only in savagery.
+
+How little true that is; as wide of truth as the statements that the far
+influences of Iona ceased with the death of Columba. Not only was the
+island for two centuries thereafter (in the words of an eminent
+historian) "the nursery of bishops, the centre of education, the asylum
+of religious knowledge, the place of union, the capital and necropolis
+of the Celtic race," but the spiritual colonies of Iona had everywhere
+leavened western Europe. Charlemagne knew and reverenced "this little
+people of Iona," who from a remote island in the wild seas beyond the
+almost as remote countries of Scotland and England had spread the Gospel
+everywhere. Not only were many monasteries founded by monks from Iona in
+the narrower France of that day, but also in Lorraine, Alsatia, in
+Switzerland, and in the German states; in distant Bavaria even, no
+fewer than sixteen were thus founded. In the very year the Danes made
+their first descent on the doomed island, a monk of Iona was Bishop of
+Tarento in Italy. In a word, in that day, Iona was the brightest gem in
+the spiritual crown of Rome.
+
+
+_Page 128._ The "little-known namesake of my own" alluded to is Fiona,
+or Fionaghal Macleod, known (in common with her more famous sister Mary)
+by the appellation _Nighean Alasdair Ruadh_, "Daughter of Alasdair the
+Red," was born _circa_ 1575.
+
+
+_Page 130._ Columba, whose house-name was Crimthan, "Wolf"--surviving in
+our Scoto-Gaelic MacCrimmon--who was of royal Irish blood and, through
+his mother of royal Scottish (Pictish) blood also, came to Iona in A.D.
+563, when he was in his forty-second year. At that date, St. Augustine,
+"the English Columba," had not yet landed in Kent--that more famous
+event occurring thirty-four years later. In this year of 563, the East
+had not yet awakened to its wonderful dream that to-day has in number
+more dreamers than the Cross of Christ; for it was not till six years
+later, when Columba was on a perilous mission of conversion among the
+Picts, that Mahomet was born. In 563, when Colum landed on Iona, the
+young Italian priest who was afterwards to be called the Architect of
+the Church and to become famous as Pope Gregory the Great, was dreaming
+his ambitious dreams; and farther East, in Constantinople, then the
+capital of the Western World, the great Roman Emperor Justinian was
+laying the foundation of modern law.
+
+
+With the advent of Charlemagne, two hundred years later, "the old world"
+passed. When the ninth century opened, the great Gregory's dearest hopes
+were in the dust where his bones lay; Justinian's metropolis was fallen
+from her pride; and, on Iona, the heathen Danes drank to Odin.
+
+
+_Page 136._ The _Mor-Rigân_. This euphemerised Celtic queen is called by
+many names: even those resembling that just given vary much--_Morrigû_,
+_Mor Reega_, _Morrigan_, _Morgane_, _Mur-ree (Mor Ree)_, etc. The old
+word _Mor-Rigan_ means "the great queen." She is the mother of the
+Gaelic Gods, as _Bona Dea_ of the Romans. "_Anu_ is her name," says an
+ancient writer. Anu suckled the elder gods. Her name survives in
+_Tuatha-De-Danann_, in _Dânu_, _Ana_, and perhaps in that mysterious
+Scoto-Gaelic name, Teampull _Anait_--the temple of Anait--whom some
+writers collate with an ancient Asiatic goddess, Anait (see p. 171). It
+has been suggested that the Celts gave _Bona Dea_ to the Romans, for
+these considered her Hyperborean. A less likely derivation of the
+popular "_Morrigû_" is that _Mor Reega_ is _Mor Reagh_ (wealth).
+Keating, it may be added, speaks of Monagan, Badha, and Macha as the
+three chief goddesses of the Divine Race of Ana (the Tuatha De Danann).
+Students of Celtic mythology and legend, and of the Táin-bó-Cuailgne in
+particular, will remember that her white bull "Find-Bennach" was
+"antagonist" to the famous brown bull of Cuailgne. The Mor Rigan has
+been identified with Cybele--as the Goddess of Prosperity: but only
+speculatively. Another name of the Mother of all Gods is _Aine (Anu?)_.
+Prof. Rhys says _Ri_ or _Roi_ was the Mother of the gods of the
+non-Celtic races. It is suggestive that _Ana_ is a Phoenician word: that
+people had a (virgin?) goddess named _Ana-Perema_.
+
+
+_Page 156._ _Finn_--_Oisìn_--_Oscur_--_Gaul_--_Diarmid_--_Cuchullin_.
+These names as they stand exhibit the uncertainty of Gaelic
+name-spelling. In the case of the first named there is constant
+variation. The oldest writing is Find (also Fend), or Fin. Some Gaelic
+writers prefer, in modern use, Fionn. Through a misapprehension,
+Macpherson popularised the name in Scotland as Fingal, and the _Féin_
+and _Fianna_ (for they are not the same, as commonly supposed, the
+former being the Clan or People of Finn, and the latter a kind of
+militia raised for the defence of Uladh), as the Fingalians. Some Irish
+critics have been severe upon Macpherson's "impossible nomenclature";
+but _Fingal_ is not "impossible," though it is certainly not old Gaelic
+for Finn--for the word can quite well stand for Fair Stranger, and might
+well have been a name given to a Norse (or for that matter a Gaelic)
+champion.
+
+_Fin MacCumhal_ (Fin MacCooal or MacCool) is now commonly rendered as
+Finn or Fionn. The latter is good Gaelic and the finer word, but the
+other is older. Fionn obtains more in Gaelic Scotland. _Fingal_ and the
+_Fingalians_ are modern, and due solely to the great vogue given by
+Macpherson--though many writers and even Gaelic speakers have adopted
+them.
+
+Fionn's famous son, again, is almost universally (outside Gaelic
+Scotland and Ireland) known as Ossian, because of Macpherson's spelling
+of the name. Neither the Highland nor Irish Gaels pronounce it so--but
+Oshshen, and the like--best represented by the Gaelic _Oisìn_ or Oisein.
+Personally I prefer Oisìn to any other spelling; but perhaps it would be
+best if the word were uniformly spelt in the manner in which it is
+universally familiar. Obviously, too, "Ossianic" is the only suitable
+use of the name in adjective form. _Oscur_ is probably merely a Gaelic
+spelling of the Norse Oscar; though I recollect a student of ancient
+Gaelic names telling me that the name was Gaelic and only resembled the
+familiar Scandinavian word. _Gaul_ is commonly so spelt; but Goll is
+probably more correct. _Diarmid_ has many variations, from Diarmuid to
+Dermid; but Diarmid is the best English equivalent both in sound and
+correctness.
+
+It is still a moot point as to whether in narration, Gaelic names should
+be given as they are, or be anglicised--or Gaelic exclamations to
+phrases in their original spelling, or more phonetically to an English
+ear. I think it should depend on circumstances, and within the writer's
+tact. I have myself been taken to task again and again, by critics eager
+with the eagerness of little knowledge, for partial anglicisation of
+names and presumed mistakes in Gaelic spelling, when, surely, the
+intention was obvious that a compromise was being attempted. Let me give
+an example. How would the English reader like a story of, say, a Donald
+Macintyre and a Grace Maclean and an Ivor Mackay if these names were
+given in their Gaelic form, as Domnhuil Mac-an-t-Saoir and Giorsal nic
+Illeathain and Imhir Mac Aodh--or even if simple names, like, say, Meave
+and Malvina, were given as Medb or Malmhin?
+
+It is a pity there is not one recognised way of spelling the legendary
+name of Setanta, the chief hero of the Gaelic chivalry. Probably the
+best rendering is Cuchulain. The old form is Cuculaind. But colloquially
+the name in Gaelic is called Coohoolin or Coohullun; and so Cuculaind
+would mislead the ordinary reader. The Scottish version is generally
+Cuchullin--the _ch_ soft: a more correct rendering of the Macphersonian
+Cuthullin, a misnomer responsible no doubt for the common mistake that
+the Coolin (Cuthullin) mountains in Skye have any connection with the
+great Gaelic hero (see p. 155). Setanta, a prince of Uladh, was taught
+for a time in the art of weaponry by one Culain or Culaind, and after a
+certain famous act of prowess became known as The Hound of Culain--_Cu_
+being a hound, whence Cuculain, or with the sign of the genitive,
+Cuchulain. Every variation of the name, and all the legends of the
+Cuchullin cycle, will be found in Miss Eleanor Hull's excellent
+redaction, published by Mr. Nutt. The interested reader should see also
+the classical work of O'Curry: the vivid and romantic chronicle of Mr.
+Standish O'Grady; and the fascinating and scholarly edition of _The
+Feast of Bricrin_, recently published as the second volume of the Irish
+Texts Society, by Dr. George Henderson, the most scholarly of Highland
+specialists.
+
+
+_Page 162 seq._ No one has collected so much material on the subject of
+St. Michael as Mr. Alexander Carmichael has done. Some of his lore, in
+sheiling-hymns and fishing-hymns, he has already made widely known,
+directly and indirectly: but in his forthcoming _Or agus Ob_, already
+alluded to, there will be found a long and invaluable section devoted to
+St. Micheil, as also, I understand, one of like length and interest on
+St. Bride or Briget, the most beloved of Hebridean saints, and herself
+probably a Christian successor of a much more ancient Brighde, a Celtic
+deity, it is said, of Song and Beauty.
+
+
+_Page 181. Be'al._ I do not think there is any evidence to prove that
+the Be'al or Bêl often spelt Baal--whose name and worship survive to
+this day in _Bealltainn_ (Beltane), May-day--of Gaelic mythology, is
+identical with the Phoenician god Baal, though probably of a like
+significance. The Gaelic name, which may be anglicised into Be'al,
+signifies "Source of All."
+
+I am inclined to believe that the Be'al or Bêl of the Gaels has his
+analogue in the Gaulish mythology in _Hesus_ (also _Esua_, _Aesus_, and
+_Heus_), a mysterious (supreme?) god of ancient Gaul, surviving still in
+Armorican legend. If so, Hesus or Aesus may be identical with the "lost"
+Gaelic god _Aesar_ or _Aes_. _Aesar_ means "fire-kindler," whence the
+Creator. (In this connection I would ask if _Aed_, an ancient Gaelic god
+of fire, also of death, be identical with (as averred) a still more
+ancient Greek name of Fire, or God of Fire = _Aed_?). Be'al, the Source
+of All, may take us back to the Phoenician _Baal_: but the Gaelic _Aes_
+and the Gaulish _Aesus (Hesus)_ take us, with the Scandinavian _Aesir_,
+further still: to the Persian _Aser_, the Hindoo _Aeswar_, the Egyptian
+_Asi_ (the Sun-bull), and the Etruscan _Aesar_. The _Bhagavat-Gita_ says
+of Aeswar that "he resides in every mortal."
+
+
+_Pages 199-203._ This section, slightly adapted, is from an unpublished
+book, in gradual preparation, entitled _The Chronicles of the Sìdhe_.
+
+
+_Page 225. The Culdees._ Though I have alluded in the text to the
+probable meaning of a word that has perplexed many people, I add this
+note as I have just come upon another theoretical statement about the
+Culdees as though they were an oriental race or sect. The writer
+evidently thinks they are the same as Chaldæans, and builds a
+startlingly unscientific theory on that assumption. In all probability
+the word is simply _Cille-Dè_, _i.e._, [the man of the] Cell of
+God--_Cille_ being Cell, a Church--and so a Cille-Dè man would be "man
+of God," a monk, a cleric. A much more puzzling problem obtains in the
+apparent traces of Buddha-worship in the Hebrides. It may or may not be
+of much account that the author of _Lewisiana_ "admits reluctantly" that
+"we must accept the possibility of a Buddhist race passing north of
+Ireland." I have not seen _Lewisiana_ for some years, and cannot recall
+on what grounds the author arrives at his conclusion. But from my notes
+on the subject I see that M. Coquebert-Montbret, in the _Soc. des
+Antiquaires de_ _France_, argues at great length that the Asiatic
+Buddhist missionaries who penetrated to Western Europe, reached Ireland
+and Scotland. He asks if the ancient Gaelic Deity named _Budd_ or
+_Budwas_ be not _Buddh_ (Buddha). Another French antiquary avers that
+the Druids were "an order of Eastern priests adoring Buddwas." Some
+light on the problem is thrown by the fact that the Gaulo-Celtic museum
+in St. Germain is an ancient Celtic "god"--the fourth in kind that has
+been found--with its legs crossed after the manner of the Indian Buddha.
+It is more interesting still to note that in the Hebrides spirits are
+sometimes called _Boduchas_ or _Buddachs_, and that the same word is (or
+used to be) applied to heads of families, as the Master.
+
+
+_Pages 242, 248._ These two sections, rearranged, and in part rewritten,
+are excerpted from what I wrote in Iona, some five years ago, for a
+preface to _The Sin-Eater_.
+
+
+_Page 256._ In its original form this was written about a book of great
+interest and beauty, _The Shadow of Arvor: Legendary Romances of
+Brittany_. Translated and retold by Edith Wingate Rinder.
+
+_Arvor (or Armor_) is one of the bardic equivalents of _Armorica_, as
+Brittany is called in many old tales. The name means the Sea-Washed
+Land, _Vor_ or _Mor_ being Breton for "sea," as in the famous region
+_Morbihan_ the Little Sea. Neither the Bretons for their Cymric kindred,
+however, call Brittany _Arvor_, or the Latinised _Armorica_. Arvor is
+the poetic name of a portion of Basse Bretagne only. Bretons call
+Brittany _Breiz_, and their language _Brezoned_, and themselves
+_Breiziaded_ (singular _Breiziad_)--as they keep to the French
+differentiation of _Bretagne_ and _Grande Bretagne_ in _Bro-Zaos_, the
+Saxon-Land, as they speak of France (beyond Brittany), as _Bro-chall_,
+the Land of Gaul. In Gaelic I think Brittany is always spoken of as
+_Breatunn-Beag_, Little Britain. The Welsh call the country, its people,
+and language, _Llydaw_, _Llydawiaid_, _Llydawaeg_.
+
+                                                                 F. M.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+By Mrs. William Sharp
+
+
+The first edition of _The Divine Adventure: Iona: By Sundown Shores_ was
+published in 1900 by Messrs. Chapman and Hall. The Titular Essay (since
+revised) appeared first in _The Fortnightly Review_ for November and
+December, 1899. A large portion of "Iona" (though in different sequence)
+appeared also in _The Fortnightly_, March and April, 1900. Both
+"spiritual histories" were published separately in book form in America
+by Mr. T. Mosher; "Iona," curtailed and rearranged under the title of
+"The Isle of Dreams," in 1905. The Essay "Celtic" in its original form,
+first printed in _The Contemporary Review_, will now be found, revised
+and materially added to, in _The Winged Destiny_. In this Uniform
+Edition of the writings of "Fiona Macleod" (William Sharp) the following
+stories, etc., have been transferred to the present volume: "The White
+Fever" and "The Smoothing of the Hand" from _The Sin-Eater_; "The White
+Heron" which relates to the earlier story of Mary Maclean in _Pharais_,
+is from _The Dominion of Dreams_, and in its earliest version appeared
+with illustrations in the Christmas number of _Harper_ in 1898. "A
+Dream" appeared first in the _Theosophical Review_ of September, 1904.
+Finally I have added to this volume the latter portion and some detached
+fragments from _Green Fire_, a Romance by "Fiona Macleod" dealing with
+Brittany and the Hebrid Isles and published in 1896 by Messrs. A.
+Constable, and in America by Messrs. Harper Bros. But William Sharp
+considered that the book suffered from grave defects of design and
+construction and decided that, when out of print, it should not be
+republished. "The Herdsman," however, is--as he stated in a note to the
+first Edition of _The Dominion of Dreams_, "a re-written and materially
+altered version of the Hebridean part of _Green Fire_ of which book it
+is all I care to preserve." Nevertheless, in accordance with the wishes
+of several friends, I have very willingly put together a series of
+detached fragments from the book and placed them beside "The Herdsman"
+as, in our opinion equally worthy of preservation, since the author's
+prohibition precludes the possibility of reprinting the book in its
+entirety.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    WOODS & SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, LONDON, N.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+          _UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_
+
+          THE COLLECTED WORKS OF FIONA MACLEOD
+          (WILLIAM SHARP)
+
+          In Seven Volumes. Crown 8vo. Price 5s. net.
+          With Photogravure Frontispieces from
+          Photographs and Drawings by D. Y. Cameron,
+          A.R.S.A.
+
+            I. PHARAIS: THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS
+           II. THE SIN EATER; THE WASHER OF THE FORD AND
+               OTHER LEGENDARY MORALITIES
+          III. THE DOMINION OF DREAMS: UNDER THE DARK
+               STAR
+           IV. THE DIVINE ADVENTURE: IONA: STUDIES IN
+               SPIRITUAL HISTORY
+            V. THE WINGED DESTINY: STUDIES IN THE
+               SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF THE GAEL
+           VI. THE SILENCE OF AMOR: WHERE THE FOREST
+               MURMURS
+          VII. POEMS AND DRAMAS
+
+
+          ALSO UNIFORM WITH THE ABOVE
+
+          SELECTED WRITINGS OF WILLIAM SHARP
+
+          In Five Volumes
+
+            I. POEMS
+           II. STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS
+          III. PAPERS CRITICAL AND REMINISCENT
+           IV. LITERARY GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL SKETCHES
+            V. VISTAS: GIPSY CHRIST AND OTHER PROSE
+               IMAGININGS
+
+          AND
+          MEMOIRS OF WILLIAM SHARP
+          (FIONA MACLEOD)
+          Compiled by MRS. WILLIAM SHARP
+          (In two volumes)
+
+          LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
+
+
+
+
+  +------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes:                                             |
+  |                                                                  |
+  | Obvious punctuation errors repaired.                             |
+  |                                                                  |
+  | Printer errors corrected. These include:                         |
+  | - Page 34, word "creening" corrected to be "creeping" (night-jar |
+  |   creeping forward)                                              |
+  | - Page 40, word "it's" corrected to be "its" (for its need)      |
+  | - Page 94, word "lighed" corrected to be "lighted" (whose flame  |
+  |   lighted)                                                       |
+  | - Page 189, word "do" corrected to be "no" (speak no more)       |
+  | - Page 196, word "bu" corrected to be "but" (had nane but)       |
+  | - Page 224, word "Colnm" corrected to be "Colum" (Colum the      |
+  |   White)                                                         |
+  | - Page 314, word "lonroid" corrected to be "loneroid" (bracken   |
+  |   and loneroid)                                                  |
+  | - Page 344, word "thonght" corrected to be "thought" (as he      |
+  |   thought)                                                       |
+  | - Page 347, word "npon" corrected to be "upon" (here upon Rona)  |
+  | - Page 377, word "sale" corrected to be "sail" (useless sail)    |
+  | - Page 378, word "Allen" corrected to be "Alan" (to affect Alan) |
+  | - Page 384, word "commume" corrected to be "commune" (enjoyed    |
+  |   the commune)                                                   |
+  | - Page 390, word "mavellous" corrected to be "marvellous" (so    |
+  |   many marvellous)                                               |
+  | - Page 402, word "hs" corrected to be "he" (he dreamed his)      |
+  | - Page 416, word "treasures-trove" corrected to be               |
+  |   "treasure-troves" (many treasure-troves rescued)               |
+  |                                                                  |
+  | The author's variable spelling (both in English and Gaelic) has  |
+  | been kept. This includes:                                        |
+  | - Both "airidh" and "àiridh"                                     |
+  | - Both "Amadan-Dhu" and "Amadan Dhû"                             |
+  | - Both Angus "Og" and "Òg"                                       |
+  | - Both "Beite" and "Beithe"                                      |
+  | - Both Buachaill "Ban" and "Bàn"                                 |
+  | - Both "bhuachaile" and "bhuachaille"                            |
+  | - Both "chlarsach" and "chlarsaich"                              |
+  | - Both "Coolins" and "Coolin" mountain                           |
+  | - Both "Eachainn" and "Eachain" MacEachainn                      |
+  | - Both "Fèinn" and "Féinn"                                       |
+  | - Both "fore-knowledge" and "foreknowledge"                      |
+  | - Both "foretell" and "fortell"                                  |
+  | - Both "hill-slope" and "hillslope"                              |
+  | - Both "maighdean-mhara" and "Maigh-deann-M'hara"                |
+  | - Both mo "ghraidh" and "ghràidh"                                |
+  | - Both "mythopoëic" and "mythopoeic"                             |
+  | - Both "n'Aondruim" and "n'-Aondruim"                            |
+  | - Both "Oìsin" and "Oisìn"                                       |
+  | - Both "re-born" and "reborn"                                    |
+  | - Both "re-written" and "rewritten"                              |
+  | - Both "Reilig" and "Réilig" Odhrain                             |
+  | - Both "sea-fowl" and "seafowl"                                  |
+  | - Both "sea-weed" and "seaweed"                                  |
+  | - Both "sheiling-hymn" and "shealing-hymn"                       |
+  | - "Sliochd-nan-Ron," "Sliochd nan Ron," and "Sliochd-nan-ròn"    |
+  | - Both "Sìdhe" and "Sidhe"                                       |
+  | - Both "sun-down" and "sundown"                                  |
+  | - Both "Uain-ghil" and "Uain ghil"                               |
+  |                                                                  |
+  | Some advertisements for other books published by William         |
+  | Heinemann were moved from the start (before the title) to the    |
+  | end of the text(after the Bibliographical Note).                 |
+  |                                                                  |
+  +------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Divine Adventure etc. (Works vol.
+4), by Fiona Macleod
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DIVINE ADVENTURE ETC. ***
+
+***** This file should be named 37293-8.txt or 37293-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/7/2/9/37293/
+
+Produced by Delphine Lettau, Judith Wirawan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.