tfully, his uncles Alan and Robin with their
understanding grin. And because there was none else for him to play with
at hurling or foot-ball, the other children now droning in class over
Caesar's Gallic War, he had gone up the big glen. It was a very
adventurous thing to go up the glen while other boys were droning their
Latin like a bagpipe being inflated, while the red-bearded schoolmaster
drowsed like a dog. First you went down the graveled path, past the
greened sun-dial, then through the gate, then a half-mile or so along
the road, green along the edges with the green of spring, and lined with
the May hawthorn, white, clean as air, with a fragrance like sustained
music, a long rill of rolling white cloud. There was nothing in the
world like the hawthorn. First it put out little bluish-green buds firm
as elastic, and then came a myriad of white stars. And then the white
drift turned a delicate red, dropped, and the scarlet haws came out, a
tasteless bread-like fruit you shared with the birds, and the stone of
it you could whip through your lips like a bullet....

He left the main road and turned into a loaning that came down the
mountain-side, a thing that once might have been a road, if there had
been any need for it, or energy to make it. But now it was only a wedge
of common land bounded on both sides by a low stone wall. Inside one
wall was a path, and inside the other a little rill, and betwixt the two
of them were firm moss and stones. And here the moss was yellowish-green
and there red as blood. And the rill was edged with ferns and queer blue
flowers whose names he did not know in English, and now the water just
gurgled over the rounded stones, and now it dropped into a well where it
was colorless and cold and fresh as the air itself, and oftentimes at
the bottom of a pool like that would be a great green frog with eyes
that popped like the schoolmaster's....

And to the left of the loaning as he walked toward the mountain was a
plantation of fir-trees, twenty acres or more, the property of the third
cousin of his mother's brother-in-law, a melancholy, thin-handed man
who lived on the Mediterranean--a Campbell, too, though one would never
take him for an Ulster Scot, with his la-di-da ways and his Spanish
lady. But the queer thing about the plantation was this, that within,
half a mile through the trees, were the ruins of a house, bare walls and
bracken and a wee place where there were five graves, two of t