The Galway Plains by W.B. Yeats — Read

Lady Gregory has just given me her beautiful _Poets and Dreamers_, and it / has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the side / of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were to my / left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald Conan of / the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are in poems and / stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway plains, I saw a / low blue hill flooded with evening light. I asked a countryman who was / with me what hill that was, and he told me it was Cruachmaa of the Sidhe. / I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe even as far north as Sligo, / for the country people have told me a great many stories of the great host / of the Sidhe who live there, still fighting and holding festivals.

I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women who / had come from it, and who would come into a house having the appearance of / countrywomen, but would know all that had happened in that house; and how / they would always pay back with increase, though not by their own hands, / whatever was given to them. And he had heard, too, of people who had been / carried away into the hill, and how one man went to look for his wife / there, and dug into the hill and all but got his wife again, but at the / very moment she was coming out to him, the pick he was digging with struck / her upon the head and killed her. I asked him if he had himself seen any / of its enchantments, and he said, 'Sometimes when I look over to the hill, / I see a mist lying on the top of it, that goes away after a while.'