r of the great brotherhood was making the noise
he heard at any moment. The wind too: he would have listened to its
thousand voices as it moved in all seasons and in all moods. Perhaps a
horse would stray into the thick screen about his home, and would look
as solemnly on Fionn as Fionn did on it. Or, coming suddenly on him,
the horse might stare, all a-cock with eyes and ears and nose, one
long-drawn facial extension, ere he turned and bounded away with
manes all over him and hoofs all under him and tails all round him. A
solemn-nosed, stern-eyed cow would amble and stamp in his wood to find a
flyless shadow; or a strayed sheep would poke its gentle muzzle through
leaves.

"A boy," he might think, as he stared on a staring horse, "a boy cannot
wag his tail to keep the flies off," and that lack may have saddened
him. He may have thought that a cow can snort and be dignified at
the one moment, and that timidity is comely in a sheep. He would have
scolded the jackdaw, and tried to out-whistle the throstle, and wondered
why his pipe got tired when the blackbird's didn't. There would be flies
to be watched, slender atoms in yellow gauze that flew, and filmy specks
that flittered, and sturdy, thick-ribbed brutes that pounced like cats
and bit like dogs and flew like lightning. He may have mourned for the
spider in bad luck who caught that fly. There would be much to see and
remember and compare, and there would be, always, his two guardians. The
flies change from second to second; one cannot tell if this bird is a
visitor or an inhabitant, and a sheep is just sister to a sheep; but the
women were as rooted as the house itself.

CHAPTER II

Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking? Fionn would not know. This was
the one who picked him up when he fell, and that was the one who patted
the bruise. This one said: "Mind you do not tumble in the well!"

And that one: "Mind the little knees among the nettles."

But he did tumble and record that the only notable thing about a well
is that it is wet. And as for nettles, if they hit him he hit back. He
slashed into them with a stick and brought them low. There was nothing
in wells or nettles, only women dreaded them. One patronised women and
instructed them and comforted them, for they were afraid about one.

They thought that one should not climb a tree!

"Next week," they said at last, "you may climb this one," and "next
week" lived at the end of the world!

But the tree