The Old Men of the Twilight by W.B. Yeats

At the place, close to the Dead Man's Point, at the Rosses, where the / disused pilot-house looks out to sea through two round windows like / eyes, a mud cottage stood in the last century. It also was a watchhouse, / for a certain old Michael Bruen, who had been a smuggler in his day, / and was still the father and grandfather of smugglers, lived there, and / when, after nightfall, a tall schooner crept over the bay from Roughley, / it was his business to hang a horn lanthorn in the southern window, that / the news might travel to Dorren's Island, and from thence, by another / horn lanthorn, to the village of the Rosses. But for this glimmering of / messages, he had little communion with mankind, for he was very old, and / had no thought for anything but for the making of his soul, at the foot / of the Spanish crucifix of carved oak that hung by his chimney, or bent / double over the rosary of stone beads brought to him a cargo of silks / and laces out of France. One night he had watched hour after hour, / because a gentle and favourable wind was blowing, and _La Mere de / Misericorde_ was much overdue; and he was about to lie down upon his / heap of straw, seeing that the dawn was whitening the east, and that the / schooner would not dare to round Roughley and come to an anchor after / daybreak; when he saw a long line of herons flying slowly from Dorren's / Island and towards the pools which lie, half choked with reeds, behind / what is called the Second Rosses. He had never before seen herons flying / over the sea, for they are shore-keeping birds, and partly because this / had startled him out of his drowsiness, and more because the long / delay of the schooner kept his cupboard empty, he took down his rusty / shot-gun, of which the barrel was tied on with a piece of string, and / followed them towards the pools.

When he came close enough to hear the sighing of the rushes in the / outermost pool, the morning was grey over the world, so that the tall / rushes, the still waters, the vague clouds, the thin mists lying among / the sand-heaps, seemed carved out of an enormous pearl. In a little he / came upon the herons, of whom there were a great number, standing with / lifted legs in the shallow water; and crouching down behind a bank of / rushes, looked to the priming of his gun, and bent for a moment over his / rosary to murmur: 'Patron Patrick, let me shoot a heron; made into a pie / it will support me for nearly four days, for I no longer eat as in my / youth. If you keep me from missing I will say a rosary to you every / night until the pie is eaten. ' Then he lay down, and, resting his gun / upon a large stone, turned towards a heron which stood upon a bank of / smooth grass over a little stream that flowed into the pool; for he / feared to take the rheumatism by wading, as he would have to do if he / shot one of those which stood in the water. But when he looked along / the barrel the heron was gone, and, to his wonder and terror, a man of / infinitely great age and infirmity stood in its place. He lowered the / gun, and the heron stood there with bent head and motionless feathers, / as though it had slept from the beginning of the world. He raised the / gun, and no sooner did he look along the iron than that enemy of all / enchantment brought the old man again before him, only to vanish when he / lowered the gun for the second time. He laid the gun down, and crossed / himself three times, and said a _Paternoster_ and an _Ave Maria_, and / muttered half aloud: 'Some enemy of God and of my patron is standing / upon the smooth place and fishing in the blessed water,' and then aimed / very carefully and slowly.