im into the Valley of the Deaf, with Niamh, his mistress,
because he will be more obedient to her; or the woman whom sorrow has
set with Helen and Iseult and Brunnhilda, and Deirdre, to share their
immortality in the rosary of the poets.

"And oh! my love!" she said, "we were often in one another's company,
and it was happy for us; for if the world had been searched from the
rising of the sun to sunset, the like would never have been found in one
place, of the Black Sainglain and the Grey of Macha, and Laeg the
chariot-driver, and myself and Cuchulain."

'And after that Emer bade Conal to make a wide, very deep grave for
Cuchulain; and she laid herself down beside her gentle comrade, and she
put her mouth to his mouth, and she said: "Love of my life, my friend,
my sweetheart, my one choice of the men of the earth, many is the woman,
wed or unwed, envied me until to-day; and now I will not stay living
after you."'

To us Irish, these personages should be very moving, very important, for
they lived in the places where we ride and go marketing, and sometimes
they have met one another on the hills that cast their shadows upon our
doors at evening. If we will but tell these stories to our children the
Land will begin again to be a Holy Land, as it was before men gave their
hearts to Greece and Rome and Judea. When I was a child I had only to
climb the hill behind the house to see long, blue, ragged hills flowing
along the southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me, what depth of
emotion is still perhaps lacking in me, because nobody told me, not even
the merchant captains who knew everything, that Cruachan of the
Enchantments lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills!

II

FION AND HIS CYCLE

A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, 'wide Almhuin of
Leinster,' where Finn and the Fianna are said to have had their house,
although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the
sites of old houses on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon flowering
gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the east, where
there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and
brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of
water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and not early
afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing where there
were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as
few places even in Ireland can, a t