too. I knew Tusa hErin as a boy. It was then a weird old
place. The yew-trees were unclipped, the turf riotous, the little lake
ungraveled ... It had an eeriness. But now--it is very different."

"Any place is different for being loved, tended."

"I suppose so. One loves but one gets careless toward ... I know Antrim
has always had an immense attraction for me ..."

"Antrim--alone?"

"Yes, of course, Antrim."

"Not all Ireland, then?"

"I never thought of Ireland as all Ireland."

"O Shane Campbell, you've sailed so much and seen so much--China, they
tell me, and South America, and the Levant. And in the North, Archangel.
I'll warrant you don't know Ireland."

"I never saw much, though, in any place outside Antrim."

"You never saw much in the little towns of the Pale, or gray Dublin,
with the Parliament where Grattan spoke now a money-changer's business
house, and the bulk of Trinity of Goldsmith and Burke--or the great wide
streets where four-in-hands used to go. And Three-Rock Mountain. And
Bray. And the beauty of the Boyne Valley. And the little safe harbors of
the South. And the mountains of Kerry. And all the kingdom of Connacht.
And the great winds of Donegal."

"But it's so eery, deserted, a dead country. All like Tusa hErin was
before you took it."

"If one could take it all, and do to it as I've done to Tusa hErin. By
the way," she asked suddenly, "is Tusa hErin haunted?"

"No, I never heard. Did you see anything?"

"I think I heard something a few times. A piper piping when the storms
rose. A queer little tune--like that thing about McCrimmon."

"_Cha till, cha till, cha till McCrimmon._"

"Are there words to it?"

"_Le cogadh mo sidhe cha till McCrimmon._"
Never, never, never, will return McCrimmon.
With war or peace never will come McCrimmon.
For money or spoil never will return McCrimmon.
He will come no more till the Day of the Gathering.

"A lamenting tune like that, I heard."

"The drone was just the grinding of the waves, the air the wind among
the yews."

"That's possible. But isn't a phantom piper possible, too, in a land of
ghosts?"

Section 8

"A land of ghosts"; the phrase remained with him. And the lighted lamp
and the burning peat fire seemed to invoke like some necromantic ritual.
How often, and he a young boy, had the names trumpeted through his
being. Brian Boru at Clontarf, and the routed red Danes. And with the
routing of the Danes, Ireland had come