hem
children's. A strange thing the lonely graves. In summer the sun would
shine through the clearing of the trees, and there was always a bird
singing somewhere near. But it was a gey lonely place for five folk to
lie there, at all times and seasons, and in the moonlight and in the
sunlight, and when the rain dripped from the fir-trees. And all the
company they had was the red fox slipping through the trees or the
rabbit hopping like a child at play or the hare-wide-eyed in the
bracken. They must have been an unsociable folk in life to build a house
in the woods, and they were an unsociable folk in death not to go to the
common graveyard, where the dead folk were together, warm and kindly
lying gently as in their beds....

He turned now from the loaning to the mountain-side, passing through the
heather on a little path the sheep made with their sharp cloven hoofs.
In single file the sheep would go up the mountain-side, obedient as
nuns, following the tinkle of the wether's bell, and they hunting a new
pasture they would crop like rabbits. Now was a stunted ash, now a
rowan-tree with its red berries--_crann caorthainn_ they call it in
Gaidhlig,--and now was a holly bush would have red berries when all the
bitter fruit of the rowan-tree was gone and the rolling sleets of winter
came over Antrim like a shroud. Everywhere about him now was the
heather, the brown, the purple heather with the perfect little flower
that people called bells, all shades of red it was, and not often you
would come across a sprig of white heather, and white heather brought
you luck, just as much luck as a four-leaved shamrock brought, and
fairer, more gallant luck.

A very silent place a mountain was, wee Shane Campbell thought, not a
lonely but a silent place. A lonely place was a place you might be
afraid, as in a wood, but a mountain was only a place apart. Down in the
fields were the big brooks, with the willow branches and great trout in
the streams; and fat cattle would low with a foolish cry like a man
wouldn't be all there, and come home in the evenings to be milked,
satisfied and comfortable as a minister; wee calves shy as babies;
donkeys with the cross of Christ on their back; goats would butt you
and you not looking; hens a-cackle, and cocks strutting like a
militiaman and him back from the camp; quiet horses had the strength of
twenty men, and scampering colts had legs on them like withes. Up here
was nothing, but you never missed