last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare,
divided from us only by a channel of shallow sea.

The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full
of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is tremulous with
the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately beauty, rise like
immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our present works are dwarfed
to insignificance.

Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly less
ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of another world
that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden past. A wordless
history is written there, in giant circles of stone and cromlechs of
piled blocks, so old that in a land of most venerable tradition their
very legend has vanished away.

Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs and
stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something
awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered stones,
the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is deepened by
the feeling of the tremendous power lavished in bringing them here,
setting them up in their ordered groups, and piling the crowns of the
cromlechs on other only less gigantic stones; awe gives place to
overwhelming mystery when we can find no kinship to our own thoughts and
aims in their stately grouping. We are in presence of archaic purposes
recorded in a massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in
the unknown.

There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances, firmly set
upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a giant necklace on
the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set alone--a single huge boulder
borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight. There are
cromlechs set in the midst of titanic circles of stone, with lesser
boulders guarding the cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside
circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting
their aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their
companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.

Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When sunrise
reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over
the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever
hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow
gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day
declin