But one to whom life appeals by a myriad avenues, all alluring and full of wonder and mystery, cannot always abide where the heart longs most to be. It is well to remember that there are shadowy waters even in the cities, and that the Fount of Youth is discoverable in the dreariest towns as well as in Hy Bràsil: a truth apt to be forgotten by those of us who dwell with ever-wondering delight in that land of lost romance which had its own day, as this epoch of a still stranger, if a less obvious, romance has its own passing hour. The titular piece--with its strange name that will not be unfamiliar to you who know our ancient Celtic literature, or may bear in mind the striking use made of it and its vague cognate legend, by Ferguson, in his Irish epic, _Congal_--gives the keynote not only of this book but of what has for hundreds of years, and to some extent still is, the characteristic of the purely Celtic mind in the Highlands and the Isles. This characteristic is a strange complexity of paganism and Christianity, or rather an apparent complexity arising from the grafting of Christianity upon paganism. Columba, St. Patrick, St. Ronan, Kentigern, all these militant Christian saints were merely transformed pagans. Even in the famous dialogue between St. Patrick and Oisìn, which is the folk-telling of the passing of the old before the new, the thrill of a pagan sympathy on the part of the uncompromising saint is unmistakable. To this day, there are Christian rites and superstitions which are merely a gloss upon a surviving antique paganism. I have known an old woman, in no wise different from her neighbours, who on the day of Beltane sacrificed a hen: though for her propitiatory rite she had no warrant save that of vague traditionary lore, the lore of the _teinntean_, of the hearth-side--where, in truth, are best to be heard the last echoes of the dim mythologic faith of our ancestors. What is the familiar "clachan," now meaning a hamlet with a kirk, but an echo of the Stones, the circles of the druids or of a more ancient worship still, that perhaps of the mysterious Anait, whose sole record is a _clach_ on a lonely moor, of which from time immemorial the people have spoken as the "Teampull na'n Anait"? A relative of mine saw, in South Uist, less than twenty-five years ago, what may have been the last sun-sacrifice in Scotland, when an old Gael secretly and furtively slew a lamb on the summit of a conical grassy knoll at sunrise. Those who have the Gaelic have their ears filled with rumours of a day that is gone. When an evicted crofter laments, _O mo chreach, mo chreach!_[1] or some poor soul on a bed of pain cries, _O mo chradshlat_,[2] he who knows the past recognises in the one the mournful refrain of the time when the sea-pirates or the hill-robbers pillaged and devasted quiet homesteads, and, in the other, not the moan of suffering only, but the cry of torment from the victim racked