e Danaan going through the wood of Dubhros. And they
heard a great noise of birds and of bees, and they went where the noise
was, and they saw the beautiful Druid tree. They went back then and told
what they had seen, and all the chief men of the Tuatha de Danaan when
they heard it knew the tree must have grown from a berry of the Land of
the Ever-Living Living Ones. And they enquired among all their people,
till they knew it was a young man of them, that was a musician, had
dropped the berry.

And it is what they agreed, to send him in search of a man of Lochlann
that would guard the tree by day and sleep in it by night. And the women
of the Sidhe were very downhearted to see him going from them, for there
was no harper could play half so sweetly on his harp as he could play on
an ivy leaf.

He went on then till he came to Lochlann, and he sat down on a bank and
sleep came on him. And he slept till the rising of the sun on the
morrow; and when he awoke he saw a very big man coming towards him, that
asked him who was he. "I am a messenger from the Men of Dea," he said;
"and I am come looking for some very strong man that would be willing to
guard a Druid tree that is in the wood of Dubhros. And here are some of
the berries he will be eating from morning to night," he said.

And when the big man had tasted the berries, he said: "I will go and
guard all the trees of the wood to get those berries."

And his name was the Searbhan Lochlannach, the Surly One of Lochlann.
Very black and ugly he was, having crooked teeth, and one eye only in
the middle of his forehead. And he had a thick collar of iron around his
body, and it was in the prophecy that he would never die till there
would be three strokes of the iron club he had, struck upon himself. And
he slept in the tree by night and stopped near it in the daytime, and he
made a wilderness of the whole district about him, and none of the
Fianna dared go hunt there because of the dread of him that was on them.

But when Diarmuid came to the wood of Dubhros, he went into it to where
the Surly One was, and he made bonds of agreement with him, and got
leave from him to go hunting in the wood, so long as he would not touch
the berries of the tree. And he made a cabin then for himself and for
Grania in the wood.

As for Finn and his people, they were not long at Almhuin till they saw
fifty armed men coming towards them, and two that were taller and
handsomer than the rest in t