I never take presents from anybody.'

The old man whispered with his dame and chuckled, and then turned his
face to me, and said, with another chuckle, 'Well, we have agreed about
the price, but, maybe, you will not consent.'

'I don't know,' said I; 'what do you demand?'

'Why, that you shake me by the hand, and hold out your cheek to my old
dame, she has taken an affection to you.'

'I shall be very glad to shake you by the hand,' said I, 'but as for the
other condition, it requires consideration.'

'No consideration at all,' said the old man, with something like a sigh;
'she thinks you like her son, our only child, that was lost twenty years
ago in the waves of the North Sea.'

'Oh, that alters the case altogether,' said I, 'and of course I can have
no objection.'

And now at once I shook off my listlessness, to enable me to do which
nothing could have happened more opportune than the above event. The
Danes, the Danes! And was I at last to become acquainted, and in so
singular a manner, with the speech of a people which had as far back as I
could remember exercised the strongest influence over my imagination, as
how should they not!--in infancy there was the summer-eve adventure, to
which I often looked back, and always with a kind of strange interest
with respect to those to whom such gigantic and wondrous bones could
belong as I had seen on that occasion; and, more than this, I had been in
Ireland, and there, under peculiar circumstances, this same interest was
increased tenfold. I had mingled much whilst there with the genuine
Irish--a wild but kind-hearted race, whose conversation was deeply imbued
with traditionary lore, connected with the early history of their own
romantic land, and from them I heard enough of the Danes, but nothing
commonplace, for they never mentioned them but in terms which tallied
well with my own preconceived ideas. For at an early period the Danes
had invaded Ireland, and had subdued it, and, though eventually driven
out, had left behind them an enduring remembrance in the minds of the
people, who loved to speak of their strength and their stature, in
evidence of which they would point to the ancient raths or mounds where
the old Danes were buried, and where bones of extraordinary size were
occasionally exhumed. And as the Danes surpassed other people in
strength, so, according to my narrators, they also excelled all others in
wisdom, or rather in Draoitheac, or magic, for