was the way of it.

When I was a lonely boy, dreaming dreams of ages past and long ago, I
had a favourite haunt. I made my way to the graveyard and lay among
the long lush grass, for the grass grew nowhere so long or so full of
sap as in the graveyard, and I thought of all the great warriors of our
glens whose bones had been laid in this place, and shivered to think of
the hot red blood stilled in death, and the grass roots creeping
downwards like tentacles into the chinks of the wood, and sending up
great fat greasy blades that sweated in the sun. I hated the grass
roots, and dreamed horribly of them piercing into my heart, and drawing
the life-blood to feed the bloated sweaty leaves, but the graveyard had
an awful fascination for me. Sometimes old men would wander inside the
dyke and move slowly to a rude stone and sit there, and I would hear
great sighs bursting into the quiet afternoon, when the sun always beat
down. But I liked the old men for being there when the ivy rustled on
the ruined old chapel wall when the wind was lost, and the starlings
flew affrighted from their nests over the mural tablet that told all
men to--

FIR GOD
16--

And I feared God very much, and spoke to Him often in my lonely
wanderings, when I saw wee men in green coats among the heather, but
oftener on the soft green turfy bits on the hill. And one awful time
when the hill road was all silent and the grasshoppers hidden and
quiet, an eerie humming came into my ears like a language I could not
understand, and I felt myself waiting for something. Round the turn of
the hill before you come to the old quarry it came, and I stopped
stricken as a rabbit when a snake sways before it, for there came
towards me a thing like a dog--but such a dog--its shaggy coat was
white and its ears only were black, and as it passed its tongue lolled
out, and it looked at me through blue eyes with black rims, and I think
I feared that thing more than God. But always before I left the
graveyard for my hill road home I crept up to a window, and looked into
a part of the chapel that was walled off and dark. Great brambles grew
in this space and nettles of phenomenal size, with ugly fleshy-looking
clots of seeds on them. A gnarled ash-tree had grown and broken the
wall, but over against the broken wall were great stones, and one of
these I liked best of all, for it made the blood tingle down my back
and my eyes see visions. On a warm Sunday I lay