discovered on the rumbling train that apart from the
hurling and the foot-ball and the jumping of horses, what life I
remembered of Ulster was bound up in Malachi Campbell of the Long
Glen...

A very strange old man, hardy as a blackthorn, immense, bowed
shoulders, the face of some old hawk of the mountains, hair white and
plentiful as some old cardinal's. All his kinsfolk were dead except
for one granddaughter... And he had become a tradition in the glens...
It was said he had been an ecclesiastical student abroad, in
Valladolid...and that he had forsaken that life. And in France he had
been a tutor in the family of MacMahon, roi d' Irlande...and somewhere
he had married, and his wife had died and left him money...and he had
come back to Antrim... He had been in the Papal Zouaves, and fought
also in the American Civil War... A strange old figure who knew Greek
and Latin as well as most professors, and who had never forgotten his
Gaelic...

Antrim will ever color my own writing. My Fifth Avenue will have
something in it of the heather glen. My people will have always a
phrase, a thought, a flash of Scots-Irish mysticism, and for that I
must either thank or blame Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen. The
stories I heard, and I young, were not of Little Rollo and Sir Walter
Scott's, but the horrible tale of the Naked Hangman, who goes through
the Valleys on Midsummer's Eve; of Dermot, and Granye of the Bright
Breasts; of the Cattle Raid of Maeve, Queen of Connacht; of the old age
of Cuchulain in the Island of Skye; grisly, homely stories, such as yon
of the ghostly foot-ballers of Cushendun, whose ball is a skull, and
whose goal is the portals of a ruined graveyard; strange religious
poems, like the Dialogue of Death and the Sinner:

Do thugainn loistin do gach deoraidh treith-lag--
I used to give lodging to every poor wanderer;
Food and drink to him I would see in want,
His proper payment to the man requesting reckoning,
Och! Is not Jesus hard if he condemns me!

All these stories, of all these people he told, had the unreal,
shimmering quality of that mirage that is seen from Portrush cliffs, a
glittering city in a golden desert, surrounded by a strange sea mist.
All these songs, all these words he spoke, were native, had the same
tang as the turf smoke, the Gaelic quality that is in dark lakes on
mountains summits, in plovers nests amid the heather... And to
remember them now in New York, to se