and had a hearty supper and a soft bed; and in
the morning she called him up early, and she gave him directions where
to meet the cat and how to find it, and she told him there was only
one vital spot on that cat, and it was a black speck on the bottom of
the cat's stomach, and unless he could happen to run his sword right
through this, the cat would surely kill him. She said:

"My poor Amadan, I'm very much afraid you'll not come back alive. I
cannot go to help you myself, or I would; but there is a well in my
garden, and by watching that well I will know how the fight goes with
you. While there is honey on top of the well, I will know you are
getting the better of the cat; but if the blood comes on top, then the
cat is getting the better of you; and if the blood stays there, I will
know, my poor Amadan, that you are dead."

The Amadan bade her good-bye, and set out to travel to where the Seven
Glens met at the sea. Here there was a precipice, and under the
precipice a cave. In this cave the Silver Cat lived, and once a day
she came out to sun herself on the rocks.

The Amadan let himself down over the precipice by a rope, and he
waited until the cat came out to sun herself.

When the cat came out at twelve o'clock and saw the Amadan, she let a
roar out of her that drove the waters back of the sea and piled them
up a quarter of a mile high, and she asked him who he was and how he
had the impudence to come there to meet her.

The Amadan said: "They call me the Amadan of the Dough, and I have
killed Slat Mor, Slat Man, Slat Beag, the Cailliach of the Rocks and
her four badachs, the Black Bull of the Brown Woods, the White Wether
of the Hill of the Waterfalls, and the Beggarman of the King of
Sweden, and before night I will have killed the Silver Cat of the
Seven Glens."

"That you never will," says she, "for a dead man you will be
yourself." And at him she sprang.

But the Amadan raised his sword and struck at her, and both of them
fell to the fight, and a great, great fight they had. They made the
hard ground into soft, and the soft into spring wells; they made the
rocks into pebbles, and the pebbles into gravel, and the gravel fell
over the country like hailstones. All the birds of the air from the
lower end of the world to the upper end of the world, and all the wild
beasts and tame from the four ends of the earth, came flocking to see
the fight; and if the fights that the Amadan had had on the other days
wer