from all outward influence, where, in the mystic solitude, the valiant and great among the living may commune with the spirits of the mighty dead.  The dead, though hidden, are not passed away; their souls are in perpetual nearness to ours.  If we enter deep within ourselves, to the remote shrine of the heart, as they entered that secluded shrine, we may find the mysterious threshold where their world and our world meet.

In the gloom and silence of those pyramid-chambers, the De Danaans thus sought the souls of their mighty ones—­the Dagda, surnamed the Mighty, and Lug the Long-Armed, and Ogma of the Sunlike Face, and Angus the Young.  From these luminous guardians they sought the inbreathing of wisdom, drawing into themselves the might of these mightier ones, and rising toward the power of their immortal world.  And to these sacred recesses they brought the ashes of their mighty dead, as a token that they, too, had passed through the secret gateway to the Land of the Ever Young.

Some thirty miles to the west of Brugh, on the Boyne, a low range of hills rises from the central plain, now bearing the name of Slieve na Calliagh, the Witch’s Hill.  In the days of the great forest this was the first large open space to the west coming from Brugh, and, like it, a quiet and remote refuge among the woods.  On the hillsides of Slieve na Calliagh are other pyramids of stone, in all things like those of Brugh, and with the same chambered sanctuaries, but of lesser size; belonging, perhaps, to a later age, when the De Danaans were no longer supreme in the land, but took their place beside newcome invaders.  These lesser shrines were also sacred places, doorways to the hidden world, entrance-gates to the Land of the Ever Young.  There also was beheld the vision of the radiant departed; there also were fonts of baptism, basins wrought of granite brought hither from the distant hills of Mourne or Wicklow.  As in all lands, these fonts were used in the consecration of the new birth, from which man rises conscious of his immortality.

In harmony with this faith of theirs, our present tradition sees in the De Danaans a still haunting impalpable presence, a race invisible yet real, dwelling even now among our hills and valleys.  When the life of the visible world is hushed, they say, there is another life in the hidden, where the Dagda Mor and Ogma and Lug and Angus still guard the De Danaan hosts.  The radiance of their nearness is all through the land, like the radiance of the sun hidden behind storm-clouds, glimmering through the veil.

[Illustration:  White Rocks, Portrush]