Hanrahan, that was never long in one place, was back again among the
villages that are at the foot of Slieve Echtge, Illeton and Scalp and
Ballylee, stopping sometimes in one house and sometimes in another,
and finding a welcome in every place for the sake of the old times
and of his poetry and his learning. There was some silver and some
copper money in the little leather bag under his coat, but it was
seldom he needed to take anything from it, for it was little he used,
and there was not one of the people that would have taken payment
from him. His hand had grown heavy on the blackthorn he leaned on,
and his cheeks were hollow and worn, but so far as food went,
potatoes and milk and a bit of oaten cake, he had what he wanted of
it; and it is not on the edge of so wild and boggy a place as Echtge
a mug of spirits would be wanting, with the taste of the turf smoke
on it. He would wander about the big wood at Kinadife, or he would
sit through many hours of the day among the rushes about Lake
Belshragh, listening to the streams from the hills, or watching the
shadows in the brown bog pools; sitting so quiet as not to startle
the deer that came down from the heather to the grass and the tilled
fields at the fall of night. As the days went by it seemed as if he
was beginning to belong to some world out of sight and misty, that
has for its mearing the colours that are beyond all other colours and
the silences that are beyond all silences of this world. And
sometimes he would hear coming and going in the wood music that when
it stopped went from his memory like a dream; and once in the
stillness of midday he heard a sound like the clashing of many
swords, that went on for long time without any break. And at the fall
of night and at moonrise the lake would grow to be like a gateway of
silver and shining stones, and there would come from its silence the
faint sound of keening and of frightened laughter broken by the wind,
and many pale beckoning hands.