ll but fell from the saddle.

"But that man's dead!"

But he wasn't dead. He was in New York. He was traveling from the
craigs of Ulster to his grandson, who had an orange-grove on the Indian
River, in Florida. He wasn't dead. And I said to myself with
impatience, "Must every man born ninety years ago be dead?"

"But this is a damned thing," I thought, "to be saddled with a man over
ninety years old. To have to act as GARDE-MALADE at my age! Why
couldn't he have stayed and died at home? Sure, one of these days he
will die, as we all die, and the ghost of him will never be content on
the sluggish river, by the mossy trees, where the blue herons and the
white cranes and the great gray pelicans fly. It will be going back, I
know, to the booming surf and the red-berried rowan-trees and the
barking eagles of Antrim. To die out of Ulster, when one can die in
Ulster, there is a gey foolish thing..."

But the harsh logic of Ulster left me, and the soft mood of Ulster came
on me as I remembered him, and I going into the town on the train. And
the late winter grass, of Westchester, spare, scrofulous; the
jerry-built bungalows; the lines of uncomely linen; the blatant
advertising boards--all the unbeauty of it passed away, and I was again
in the Antrim glens. There was the soft purple of the Irish Channel,
and there the soft, dim outline of Scotland. There was the herring
school silver in the sun, and I could see it from the crags where the
surf boomed like a drum. And underfoot was the springy heather, the
belled and purple heather...

And there came to me again the vision of the old man's thatched
farmhouse when the moon was up and the bats were out, and the winds of
the County Antrim came bellying down the glens... The turf fire burned
on the hearth, now red, now yellow, and there was the golden light of
lamps, and Malachi of the Long Glen was reciting some poem of Blind
Raftery's, or the lament of Pierre Ronsard for Mary, Queen of Scots:

Ta ribin o mo cheadshearc ann mo phocs sios.
Agas mna Eirip ni leigheasfadaois mo bhron, faraor!
Ta me reidh leat go ndeantar comhra caol!
Agas gobhfasfaidh an fear no dhiaidh sin thrid mo lar anios!

There is a ribbon from my only love in my pocket deep,
And the women of Europe they could not cure my grief, alas!
I am done with you until a narrow coffin be made for me.
And until the grass shall grow after that up through my heart!

And I suddenly