"For the sake of an old song, laddie, an old and sad song.... A song your father made.... It was like seeing his ghost...." "But my father, Uncle Robin--" "Your father was the heart of corn, wee Shane, for all they say against him.... I never knew a higher, cleaner heart, but he was easy discourag't.... Aye, easy thrown down and easy led away.... I was fond of him.... Am ... always, and no matter.... However ... shall we go and see the racing boats, wee fellow?" And that was all he ever got from Uncle Robin. But he knew some of his father's songs that were sung in the country-side ... _Is truagh, a ghradh, gan me agas thu im Bla chliath! No air an traigh bhain an ait nach robh duine riamh, Seachd oidhche, seachd la, gan tamh, gan chodal, gan bhiadh, Ach thusa bhi 'm ghraidh's lamh geal thardam gu fial!_ "O God! my loved one, that you and I were in Dublin town! Or on a white strand, where no foot ever touched before. Day in, night in, without food or sleep, what mattered it? But you to be loving me and your white arm around me so generously!" He couldn't understand the song, though the lilt of the words captured him. What should people accept being without food or sleep? And what good was a white arm generously around one? However, that was love, and it was a mystery.... But that song could not have been to his mother. He could not imagine her being generous with even a white arm. And none would want to be with her on a strand without food or sleep; that he instinctively felt. She was a high, proud cliff, stern and proud and beautiful, and that song was a song of May-time and the green rushes.... And other songs of his father's were sung: "Maidne Fhoghmhair--Autumn Mornings," and "In Uir-chill an Chreagain--In the Green Graveyard of Creggan...." A queer thing that all that should be left of his father was a chill silence and a song a man might raise at the rising of the moon.... Silent he was in his grave, dumb as a stone, and all his uncles were silent, too, barring the little smile at the corners of their mouths, that was but the murmuring of the soul.... There were paintings of them all and they young in the house, their high heads, their hawks' eyes, Alan and Robin and Mungo.... And Mungo, too, was dead with Wellington in the Peninsula. He and three of his men were all left of the Antrim company. "Christ! have I lost this fight, too?" He laughed and a French ball took him in the gullet. "Be damned to that!" He coughed. "He might have got me in a cleaner place!" And that was the end of Mungo....