s on the beach, and thrown up earthworks
round their camp, instantly resented the attempt of later arrivals to
poach on their preserves, and that a fierce fight was the result. During
the whole of the following century we find signs of like rivalry between
different bands of raiders, and it becomes evident that they were as
much divided amongst themselves as were the native tribes they
fought against.

Two years later a further light is shed on this mutual strife when we
are told that "Dark Gentiles came to At-Cliat and slaughtered the Fair
Gentiles, plundering their fort and carrying away both people and
property." The next year saw a new struggle between the Dark Gentiles
and the Fair Gentiles, with much mutual slaughter. This leads us to
realize that these raiders, vaguely grouped by modern writers under the
single name of Danes, really belonged to several different races, and
doubtless came from many parts of the Baltic coasts, as well as from the
fiords of the great Scandinavian peninsula. The Dark Foreigners are
without doubt some of that same race of southern origin which we saw,
ages earlier, migrating northwards along the Atlantic seaboard,--a race
full of the spirit of the sea, and never happier than when the waves
were curling and breaking under their prows. They found their way, we
saw, as far northwards as the coast of Scotland, the Western Isles, and
distant Norway over the foam, where the long fiords and rugged
precipices gave them a congenial home. We find them hovering over the
shores of Ireland at the very dawn of her history; and, in later but
still remote ages, their power waned before the De Danaan tribes. This
same dark race returning now from Norway, swooped hawk-like upon the
rich shrines of the Irish island sanctuaries, only to come into hostile
contact once more with sons of that golden-haired race which scattered
the dark Fomorians at Mag Tuiread of the North. For the Fair Gentiles of
our mediaeval Chronicle are no other than the golden-haired
Scandinavians; the yellow-locked Baltic race that gave conquerors and a
new ideal of beauty to the whole modern world. And this Baltic race, as
we saw in an earlier epoch, was the source and mother of the old De
Danaans, whose hair was like new-smelted gold or the yellow flag-lilies
of our lakes and rivers. Thus after long ages the struggle of Fomor and
De Danaan was renewed at the Ford of the Hurdles between the Dark and
Fair Strangers, rivals for the p