A remarkable short story by the Nobel Literature Prize winner W. B. Yeats, steeped in Irish magic and folklore.
When Red Hanrahan, the itinerant schoolmaster, drops into a remote barn where Irish farm labourers are drinking and singing, he receives a message from his sweetheart to make haste to her. Her mother has died and she must marry at once or be turned out of her home. Red Hanrahan gets up to start immediately, but a strange old man sitting by the door delays him by starting a game of cards with him. As Hanrahan gets drawn into the card game, he finds himself increasingly mesmerized... and then strange magical events take over, and he finds himself wandering over the mountains following a mysterious dreamlike hunt.