ere,
an old man, weak and spent, without sight, without shape, without
comeliness, without strength or understanding, without respect.

"There, Patrick, is my story for you now," said Oisin, "and no lie in
it, of all that happened me going away and coming back again from the
Country of the Young."

CHAPTER II. OISIN IN PATRICK'S HOUSE

And Oisin stopped on with S. Patrick, but he was not very well content
with the way he was treated. And one time he said: "They say I am
getting food, but God knows I am not, or drink; and I Oisin, son of
Finn, under a yoke, drawing stones." "It is my opinion you are getting
enough," said S. Patrick then, "and you getting a quarter of beef and a
churn of butter and a griddle of bread every day." "I often saw a
quarter of a blackbird bigger than your quarter of beef," said Oisin,
"and a rowan berry as big as your churn of butter, and an ivy leaf as
big as your griddle of bread." S, Patrick was vexed when he heard that,
and he said to Oisin that he had told a lie.

There was great anger on Oisin then, and he went where there was a
litter of pups, and he bade a serving-boy to nail up the hide of a
freshly killed bullock to the wall, and to throw the pups against it one
by one. And every one that he threw fell down from the hide till it came
to the last, and he held on to it with his teeth and his nails. "Rear
that one," said Oisin, "and drown all the rest."

Then he bade the boy to keep the pup in a dark place, and to care it
well, and never to let it taste blood or see the daylight. And at the
end of a year, Oisin was so well pleased with the pup, that he gave it
the name of Bran Og, young Bran.

And one day he called to the serving-boy to come on a journey with him,
and to bring the pup in a chain. And they set out and passed by
Slieve-nam-ban, where the witches of the Sidhe do be spinning with their
spinning-wheels; and then they turned eastward into Gleann-na-Smol. And
Oisin raised a rock that was there, and he bade the lad take from under
it three things, a great sounding horn of the Fianna, and a ball of iron
they had for throwing, and a very sharp sword. And when Oisin saw those
things, he took them in his hands, and he said: "My thousand farewells
to the day when you were put here!" He bade the lad to clean them well
then; and when he had done that, he bade him to sound a blast on the
horn. So the boy did that, and Oisin asked him did he see anything
strange. "I did no