h, with its headless
horses and its headless driver. There was no use bringing these matters
up to Uncle Robin. Uncle Robin would only laugh and shout: "Havers,
bairn! Wha's been filling your wee head with nonsense?" But you could no
more deny their existence than you could that of Apollyon, whom you read
about in "Pilgrim's Progress," and who wandered up and down the world
and to and fro in it; or of the fairies, whose sweet little piping many
heard at night as they passed the forts of the little people; or of the
tiny cobbling leprechawns, who knew where the Danes had hid their store
of gold in crocks such as hold butter.... Of these there was no
explanation but the Act of God. And Uncle Robin was queer. He put no
store in the Act of God.

[Illustration]

Now, if it had been an angel he had seen in the high air, it would have
been the Act--or the banshee, and her crooning and keening by the
riverside, with her white cloak, her red, burnished hair.... But it was
an island he had seen, a dancing town, with his own hard wee Scots-Irish
eyes. And that was not an Act of God; it was a fact, and so outside his
Uncle Alan's bailiwick and within his Uncle Robin's. His Uncle Robin
would say it was the reflected image of some place in the world. Aye,
he'd take his Uncle Robin's word for that. But where was it? Surely, as
yet, it was undiscovered. It had the quiet of a June evening, that land
had, and a grand shimmering beauty.... And if it was known where it was,
wouldn't the mountainy folk be leaving their cabins, and the strong
farmers their plowed lands, and the whining tinkers be hoofing the road
for it? If it was known where that land was....

It occurred to him it must have been that land his father meant and he
writing his poem of the Green Graveyard of Creggan. While he was
sleeping under the weeping yew-trees the young queen had touched the
sleeping poet on the shoulder.

"_A shiolaigh charthannaigh_," she said, "O kindly kinsman, _na
caithtear thusa ins na nealtaibh broin_, let you not be thrown under the
clouds of sorrow! _Acht eirigh in do sheasamh_, but rise in your
standing, _agas gluais liomsa siar' sa' rod_, and travel with me
westward in the road. _Go Tir Dheas na Meala_, to the shimmering land of
honey where the foreigner has not the sway. And you will find pleasantry
in white halls persuading me to the strains of music."

Surely his father, too, had seen Dancing Town!

And it was an old story that Oisin