circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting
their aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their
companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.

Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When sunrise
reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over
the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever
hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow
gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day
declines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone
to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at
last into the universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web,
inexorable as tireless Time.

There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore, under
Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials of dead
years within our horizon. At Abbey-quarter, within the town-limits of
Sligo itself, there is another great ring of boulders, the past and the
present mingling together. On the northern coast, across the Bay of
Sligo, where the headland of Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is
another giant necklace of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther
along the shore, where Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a
cromlech and a stone circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same
rugged and enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery.

Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in hills,
wreathed with dark green woods. On a hill-top north of the lake, in the
Deer-park, is a monument of quite other character--a great oblong
marked by pillared stones, like an open temple. At three points huge
stones are laid across from pillar to pillar. The whole enclosure was