of the last stag, he thought of the
sword of magic temper that hung idle by his side in the City of Youth,
or rested from its golden nail in his bed-chamber, and he said to
Niam, "Has thy father never a foe to tame, never a wrong to avenge?
Surely the peasant is no man whose hand forgets the plough, nor the
warrior whose hand forgets the sword hilt." Niam looked on him
strangely for a while and as if she did not understand his words, or
sought some meaning in them which yet she feared to find. But at last
she said, "If deeds of arms be thy desire, Oisin, thou shalt have thy
sufficiency ere long." And so they rode home, and slept that night in
the palace of the City of Youth.

At daybreak on the following morn Niam roused Oisin, and she buckled
on him his golden-hilted sword and his corselet of blue steel inlaid
with gold. Then he put on his head a steel and gold helmet with dragon
crest, and slung on his back a shield of bronze wrought all over with
cunning hammer-work of serpentine lines that swelled and sank upon the
surface, and coiled in mazy knots, or flowed in long sweeping curves
like waves of the sea when they gather might and volume for their leap
upon the sounding shore. In the glimmering dawn, through the empty
streets of the fair city, they rode forth alone and took their way
through fields of corn and by apple orchards where red fruit hung down
to their hands. But by noontide their way began to mount upwards among
blue hills that they had marked from the city walls toward the west,
and of man's husbandry they saw no more, but tall red-stemmed pine
trees bordered the way on either side, and silence and loneliness
increased. At length they reached a broad table-land deep in the heart
of the mountains, where nothing grew but long coarse grass, drooping
by pools of black and motionless water, and where great boulders,
bleached white or stained with slimy lichens of livid red, lay
scattered far and wide about the plain. Against the sky the mountain
line now showed like a threat of bared and angry teeth, and as they
rode towards it Oisin perceived a huge fortress lying in the throat of
a wide glen or mountain pass. White as death was the stone of which it
was built, save where it was streaked with black or green from the
foulness of wet mosses that clung to its cornices and battlements, and
none seemed stirring about the place nor did any banner blow from its
towers.

Then said Niam, "This, O Oisin, is the Dun