tand that
more was expected of him than of others because he had greater
possessions. The Irish race would have become a chosen race, one of the
pillars that uphold the world.

1901.

THE GALWAY PLAINS

Lady Gregory has just given me her beautiful _Poets and Dreamers_, and it
has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the side
of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were to my
left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald Conan of
the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are in poems and
stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway plains, I saw a
low blue hill flooded with evening light. I asked a countryman who was
with me what hill that was, and he told me it was Cruachmaa of the Sidhe.
I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe even as far north as Sligo,
for the country people have told me a great many stories of the great host
of the Sidhe who live there, still fighting and holding festivals.

I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women who
had come from it, and who would come into a house having the appearance of
countrywomen, but would know all that had happened in that house; and how
they would always pay back with increase, though not by their own hands,
whatever was given to them. And he had heard, too, of people who had been
carried away into the hill, and how one man went to look for his wife
there, and dug into the hill and all but got his wife again, but at the
very moment she was coming out to him, the pick he was digging with struck
her upon the head and killed her. I asked him if he had himself seen any
of its enchantments, and he said, 'Sometimes when I look over to the hill,
I see a mist lying on the top of it, that goes away after a while.'

A great part of the poems and stories in Lady Gregory's book were made or
gathered between Burren and Cruachmaa. It was here that Raftery, the
wandering country poet of ninety years ago, praised and blamed, chanting
fine verses, and playing badly on his fiddle. It is here the ballads of
meeting and parting have been sung, and some whose lamentations for defeat
are still remembered may have passed through this plain flying from the
battle of Aughrim.

'I will go up on the mountain alone; and I will come hither from it again.
It is there I saw the camp of the Gael, the poor troop thinned, not
keeping with one another; Och Ochone!' And h