ad had
been scratched as much as he desired he arose from between the children
and went pacing away lightly through the wood. The children ran after
him and each caught hold of one of his horns, and he ambled and reared
between them while they danced along on his either side singing snatches
of bird songs, and scraps of old tunes which the Thin Woman of Inis
Magrath had learned among the people of the Shee.

In a little time they came to Gort na Cloca Mora, but here the he-goat
did not stop. They went past the big tree of the Leprecauns, through
a broken part of the hedge and into another rough field. The sun was
shining gloriously. There was scarcely a wind at all to stir the harsh
grasses. Far and near was silence and warmth, an immense, cheerful
peace. Across the sky a few light clouds sailed gently on a blue so vast
that the eye failed before that horizon. A few bees sounded their deep
chant, and now and again a wasp rasped hastily on his journey. Than
these there was no sound of any kind. So peaceful, innocent and safe did
everything appear that it might have been the childhood of the world as
it was of the morning.

The children, still clinging to the friendly goat, came near the edge
of the field, which here sloped more steeply to the mountain top. Great
boulders, slightly covered with lichen and moss, were strewn about, and
around them the bracken and gorse were growing, and in every crevice of
these rocks there were plants whose little, tight-fisted roots gripped
a desperate, adventurous habitation in a soil scarcely more than half
an inch deep. At some time these rocks had been smitten so fiercely that
the solid granite surfaces had shattered into fragments. At one place
a sheer wall of stone, ragged and battered, looked harshly out from the
thin vegetation. To this rocky wall the he-goat danced. At one place
there was a hole in the wall covered by a thick brush. The goat pushed
his way behind this growth and disappeared. Then the children, curious
to see where he had gone, pushed through also. Behind the bush they
found a high, narrow opening, and when they had rubbed their legs, which
smarted from the stings of nettles, thistles and gorse prickles, they
went into the hole which they thought was a place the goat had for
sleeping in on cold, wet nights. After a few paces they found the
passage was quite comfortably big, and then they saw a light, and
in another moment they were blinking at the god Pan and Cai