SCENE IN DONEGAL 59 



across each web of gossamer that hangs across our 

 path as we climb the long rough slope in front. 

 Around are bare bleak moorlands, too high and infertile 

 for cultivation, from the sides and hollows of which 

 the peasants dig their fuel. The signs of human 

 occupation grow fewer and fainter as we ascend. The 

 barking of the village dogs and the shouts from the 

 school playground no longer reach our ears. And 

 while we thus retire from the living world of to-day, 

 it almost seems as if we enter into progressively closer 

 communion with the past. Yonder, only a few miles 

 to the north, lies the deep hollow of Glen Columbkill 

 — that western seclusion where tradition records that 

 St. Columba, the great apostle of the Scots, in his 

 earlier years, loved to bury himself for meditation and 

 prayer. Mouldering cross and crumbling cairn, to 

 which latter every pious pilgrim adds a stone, keep 

 his memory green through the centuries. It is with 

 him and his courageous friends and disciples, rather 

 than with sights and sounds of the present time, that 

 we feel ourselves in contact here. And when, high 

 up on this bare mountain-side, we come upon the 

 ruined cells which these devoted men built with their 

 own hands out of the rough stones of the crest, and 

 to which they betook themselves for quiet intercourse 

 with Heaven, amid the wild winds and driving rains 

 of these western hills, the halo of human courage and 

 self-denial falls for us on this solitude to heighten its 

 loneliness and desolation. 



Musing on these memories of the past, we find 

 ourselves at last at the top of the slope, nearly two 

 thousand feet above the sea, and discover that from 



