" He finished up with the interesting phrase, "Sic
transit gloria Grundi," and he quotes Gautier: "'Frankly I am in earnest
this time. Order me a dove-coloured vest, apple-green trousers, a pouch,
a crook; in short, the entire outfit of a Lignon shepherd. I shall have
a lamb washed to complete the pastoral....' This is the lamb."
The magazine was an extraordinarily clever production, and the fact that
he was its author is significant. For to the end of her days Fiona was a
pagan still, albeit sometimes a more or less converted pagan. In _The
Annir-Choille_, _The Sin-Eater_, _The Washer of the Ford_, and the
others, you never get away from the ancient rites, and there is one
story which may be taken as typical of all the rest, _The Walker in the
Night_:--
"Often he had heard of her. When any man met this woman his fate
depended on whether he saw her before she caught sight of him. If she
saw him first, she had but to sing her wild strange song, and he would
go to her; and when he was before her, two flames would come out of her
eyes, and one flame would burn up his life as though it were dry tinder,
and the other would wrap round his soul like a scarlet shawl, and she
would take it and live with it in a cavern underground for a year and a
day.
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