The Wind Bloweth | Page 2

else for him to
play with at hurling or foot-ball, the other children now droning in class
over Cæsar's Gallic War, he had gone up the big glen. It was a very
adventurous thing to go up the glen while other boys were droning their
Latin like a bagpipe being inflated, while the red-bearded schoolmaster
drowsed like a dog. First you went down the graveled path, past the
greened sun-dial, then through the gate, then a half-mile or so along the
road, green along the edges with the green of spring, and lined with the

May hawthorn, white, clean as air, with a fragrance like sustained
music, a long rill of rolling white cloud. There was nothing in the world
like the hawthorn. First it put out little bluish-green buds firm as elastic,
and then came a myriad of white stars. And then the white drift turned a
delicate red, dropped, and the scarlet haws came out, a tasteless
bread-like fruit you shared with the birds, and the stone of it you could
whip through your lips like a bullet....
He left the main road and turned into a loaning that came down the
mountain-side, a thing that once might have been a road, if there had
been any need for it, or energy to make it. But now it was only a wedge
of common land bounded on both sides by a low stone wall. Inside one
wall was a path, and inside the other a little rill, and betwixt the two of
them were firm moss and stones. And here the moss was
yellowish-green and there red as blood. And the rill was edged with
ferns and queer blue flowers whose names he did not know in English,
and now the water just gurgled over the rounded stones, and now it
dropped into a well where it was colorless and cold and fresh as the air
itself, and oftentimes at the bottom of a pool like that would be a great
green frog with eyes that popped like the schoolmaster's....
And to the left of the loaning as he walked toward the mountain was a
plantation of fir-trees, twenty acres or more, the property of the third
cousin of his mother's brother-in-law, a melancholy, thin-handed man
who lived on the Mediterranean--a Campbell, too, though one would
never take him for an Ulster Scot, with his la-di-da ways and his
Spanish lady. But the queer thing about the plantation was this, that
within, half a mile through the trees, were the ruins of a house, bare
walls and bracken and a wee place where there were five graves, two of
them children's. A strange thing the lonely graves. In summer the sun
would shine through the clearing of the trees, and there was always a
bird singing somewhere near. But it was a gey lonely place for five folk
to lie there, at all times and seasons, and in the moonlight and in the
sunlight, and when the rain dripped from the fir-trees. And all the
company they had was the red fox slipping through the trees or the
rabbit hopping like a child at play or the hare-wide-eyed in the bracken.
They must have been an unsociable folk in life to build a house in the

woods, and they were an unsociable folk in death not to go to the
common graveyard, where the dead folk were together, warm and
kindly lying gently as in their beds....
He turned now from the loaning to the mountain-side, passing through
the heather on a little path the sheep made with their sharp cloven hoofs.
In single file the sheep would go up the mountain-side, obedient as
nuns, following the tinkle of the wether's bell, and they hunting a new
pasture they would crop like rabbits. Now was a stunted ash, now a
rowan-tree with its red berries--crann caorthainn they call it in
Gaidhlig,--and now was a holly bush would have red berries when all
the bitter fruit of the rowan-tree was gone and the rolling sleets of
winter came over Antrim like a shroud. Everywhere about him now
was the heather, the brown, the purple heather with the perfect little
flower that people called bells, all shades of red it was, and not often
you would come across a sprig of white heather, and white heather
brought you luck, just as much luck as a four-leaved shamrock brought,
and fairer, more gallant luck.
A very silent place a mountain was, wee Shane Campbell thought, not a
lonely but a silent place. A lonely place was a place you might be afraid,
as in a wood, but a mountain was only a place apart. Down in the fields
were the big brooks, with the willow branches and great trout in the
streams; and