pping passionate
shots, but a thirty-foot putt on the home green beat him. All through
the match his face had been dour, but now came the outstretched hand and
the smile at the corner of the mouth:

"Congratulations, sir! 'T is yourself has the grand eye for the hard
putt on the tricky green!"

The wee grin meant that Alan had been beaten.

And Uncle Robin, too, the wisest and oldest of them all, who had been to
Arabia and had been all through Europe and was Goethe's friend, he had
the twisted grin of the beaten man. Only occasionally you could get past
the grin of Uncle Robin, as he had gotten past it the day Uncle Robin
had spoken of his brother, Shane's father. And sometimes when a great
hush was on the mountains and the Moyle was silent, Uncle Robin would
murmer a verse of his great poet friend's:

Ueber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spuerest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Voegelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

The sharp u's and heavy gutturals were so like Gaidhlig, it seemed queer
wee Shane could not understand the poem; but Uncle Robin translated it
into Gaidhlig:

_Os cionn na morbheanna
Ta sith_--

And the melody of it was like the plucking of a harper's strings. So
much in so little, and every note counted, and the last line like a dim
quaint bar:

_Beidh sith agad fein!_ "You will rest, too!"

A queer thing, the men who were beaten and smiled. A queer thing the men
who, beaten, were more gallant than the winners. A queer thing for the
cummer of Cushendhu to say, she who was so wise after the hot
foolishness of youth, that he was his uncles' nephew and his father's
son. A queer thing that. A queer, dark, and secret thing.

Section 5

The memory of his Uncle Robin stuck in his mind and he going up the
mountain. His Uncle Robin knew all there was to be known in the world,
the immense learned man. When he was spoken to of anything strange, he
had always an explanation for it. When the mirage off Portrush was
mentioned, he could talk at length of strange African mirages that the
travelers see in the desert at the close of day, oases and palm-trees
and minarets, so you would think you were near to a town or a green
pasture and you miles and miles away. And there was a sight to be seen
off Sicily that the ignorant Italian people thought was the work of
Morgan le Fay. And in the Alps was a horror men spoke of and called the
Specter of the Brocken