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ame and chuckled, and then turned his face to me, and said, with another chuckle, "Well, we have agreed about the price; but, may be, 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 I was 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 they were powerful sorcerers, they said, compared with whom the fai
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