MESSER MARCO POLO

The message came to me, at the second check of the hunt, that a
countryman and a clansman needed me. The ground was heavy, the
day raw, and it was a drag, too fast for fun and too tame for sport.
So I blessed the countryman and the clansman, and turned my back on
the field.

But when they told me his name, I all but fell from the saddle.

"But that man's dead!"

But he wasn't dead. He was in New York. He was traveling from
the craigs of Ulster to his grandson, who had an orange-grove on
the Indian River, in Florida. He wasn't dead. And I said to myself
with impatience, "Must every man born ninety years ago be dead?"

"But this is a damned thing," I thought, "to be saddled with a man
over ninety years old. To have to act as GARDE-MALADE at my age!
Why couldn't he have stayed and died at home? Sure, one of these
days he will die, as we all die, and the ghost of him will never be
content on the sluggish river, by the mossy trees, where the blue
herons and the white cranes and the great gray pelicans fly. It
will be going back, I know, to the booming surf and the red-berried
rowan-trees and the barking eagles of Antrim. To die out of Ulster,
when one can die in Ulster, there is a gey foolish thing. . ."