remembered of Ulster was bound up in Malachi Campbell of the Long
Glen. . .

A very strange old man, hardy as a blackthorn, immense, bowed shoulders,
the face of some old hawk of the mountains, hair white and plentiful
as some old cardinal's. All his kinsfolk were dead except for one
granddaughter. . .And he had become a tradition in the glens. . .
It was said he had been an ecclesiastical student abroad, in Valladolid.
. .and that he had forsaken that life. And in France he had been a
tutor in the family of MacMahon, roi d' Irlande. . .and somewhere he
had married, and his wife had died and left him money. . .and he had
come back to Antrim. . .He had been in the Papal Zouaves, and fought
also in the American Civil War. . .A strange old figure who knew
Greek and Latin as well as most professors, and who had never
forgotten his Gaelic. . .

Antrim will ever color my own writing. My Fifth Avenue will have
something in it of the heather glen. My people will have always
a phrase, a thought, a flash of Scots-Irish mysticism, and for that
I must either thank or blame Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen.
The stories I heard, and I young, were not of Little Rollo and
Sir Walter Scott's, but the horrible tale of the Naked Hangman,
who goes through the Valleys on Midsummer's Eve; of Dermot, and
Granye of the Bright Breasts; of the Cattle Raid of Maeve, Queen
of Connacht; of the old age of Cuchulain in the Island of Skye;
grisly, homely stories, such as yon of the ghostly foot-ballers
of Cushendun, whose ball is a skull, and whose goal is the portals
of a ruined graveyard; strange religious poems, like the Dialogue
of Death and the Sinner: