No More Learning

They stood in a ring round the piper, and
pointed their swords at him, and the old trooper then told him that
they must kill two rebels, who had taken the road between Ben Bulben
and the great mountain spur that is called Cashel-na-Gael, and that he
must get up before one of them and be their guide, for they had lost
their way. The piper turned, and pointed to a neighbouring tree, and
they saw an old white horse ready bitted, bridled, and saddled. He
slung the pipe across his back, and, taking the torch in his hand, got
upon the horse, and started off before them, as hard as he could go.

The wood grew thinner and thinner, and the ground began to slope up
toward the mountain. The moon had already set, and the little white
flames of the stars had come out everywhere. The ground sloped more
and more until at last they rode far above the woods upon the wide
top of the mountain. The woods lay spread out mile after mile below,
and away to the south shot up the red glare of the burning town. But
before and above them were the little white flames. The guide drew rein
suddenly, and pointing upwards with the hand that did not hold the
torch, shrieked out, 'Look; look at the holy candles! ' and then plunged
forward at a gallop, waving the torch hither and thither. 'Do you hear
the hoofs of the messengers? ' cried the guide. 'Quick, quick! or they
will be gone out of your hands! ' and he laughed as with delight of the
chase.
The troopers thought they could hear far off, and as if below
them, rattle of hoofs; but now the ground began to slope more and more,
and the speed grew more headlong moment by moment. They tried to pull
up, but in vain, for the horses seemed to have gone mad. The guide
had thrown the reins on to the neck of the old white horse, and was
waving his arms and singing a wild Gaelic song. Suddenly they saw the
thin gleam of a river, at an immense distance below, and knew that they
were upon the brink of the abyss that is now called Lug-na-Gael, or in
English the Stranger's Leap. The six horses sprang forward, and five
screams went up into the air, a moment later five men and horses fell
with a dull crash upon the green slopes at the foot of the rocks.


THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT

AT the place, close to the Dead Man's Point, at the Rosses, where
the disused pilot-house looks out to sea through two round windows
like eyes, a mud cottage stood in the last century. It also was a
watchhouse, for a certain old Michael Bruen, who had been a smuggler
in his day, and was still the father and grandfather of smugglers,
lived there, and when, after nightfall, a tall schooner crept over the
bay from Roughley, it was his business to hang a horn lanthorn in the
southern window, that the news might travel to Dorren's Island, and
from thence, by another horn lanthorn, to the village of the Rosses.
But for this glimmering of messages, he had little communion with
mankind, for he was very old, and had no thought for anything but for
the making of his soul, at the foot of the Spanish crucifix of carved
oak that hung by his chimney, or bent double over the rosary of stone
beads brought to him in a cargo of silks and laces out of France. One
night he had watched hour after hour, because a gentle and favourable
wind was blowing, and _La Mere de Misericorde_ was much overdue; and
he was about to lie down upon his heap of straw, seeing that the dawn
was whitening the east, and that the schooner would not dare to round
Roughley and come to an anchor after daybreak; when he saw a long line
of herons flying slowly from Dorren's Island and towards the pools
which lie, half choked with reeds, behind what is called the Second
Rosses. He had never before seen herons flying over the sea, for they
are shore-keeping birds, and partly because this had startled him out
of his drowsiness, and more because the long delay of the schooner
kept his cupboard empty, he took down his rusty shot-gun, of which the
barrel was tied on with a piece of string, and followed them towards
the pools.

When he came close enough to hear the sighing of the rushes in the
outermost pool, the morning was grey over the world, so that the tall
rushes, the still waters, the vague clouds, the thin mist lying among
the sand-heaps, seemed carved out of an enormous pearl. In a little he
came upon the herons, of whom there were a great number, standing with
lifted legs in the shallow water; and crouching down behind a bank of
rushes, looked to the priming of his gun, and bent for a moment over
his rosary to murmur: 'Patron Patrick, let me shoot a heron; made into
a pie it will support me for nearly four days, for I no longer eat as
in my youth. If you keep me from missing I will say a rosary to you
every night until the pie is eaten. ' Then he lay down, and, resting his
gun upon a large stone, turned towards a heron which stood upon a bank
of smooth grass over a little stream that flowed into the pool; for he
feared to take the rheumatism by wading, as he would have to do if he
shot one of those which stood in the water. But when he looked along
the barrel the heron was gone, and, to his wonder and terror, a man of
infinitely great age and infirmity stood in its place. He lowered the
gun, and the heron stood there with bent head and motionless feathers,
as though it had slept from the beginning of the world.