that was climbed was not worth while when it had been
climbed twice. There was a bigger one near by. There were trees that no
one could climb, with vast shadow on one side and vaster sunshine on
the other. It took a long time to walk round them, and you could not see
their tops.

It was pleasant to stand on a branch that swayed and sprung, and it was
good to stare at an impenetrable roof of leaves and then climb into it.
How wonderful the loneliness was up there! When he looked down there
was an undulating floor of leaves, green and green and greener to a very
blackness of greeniness; and when he looked up there were leaves
again, green and less green and not green at all, up to a very snow and
blindness of greeniness; and above and below and around there was sway
and motion, the whisper of leaf on leaf, and the eternal silence to
which one listened and at which one tried to look.

When he was six years of age his mother, beautiful, long-haired Muirne,
came to see him. She came secretly, for she feared the sons of Morna,
and she had paced through lonely places in many counties before she
reached the hut in the wood, and the cot where he lay with his fists
shut and sleep gripped in them.

He awakened to be sure. He would have one ear that would catch an
unusual voice, one eye that would open, however sleepy the other one
was. She took him in her arms and kissed him, and she sang a sleepy song
until the small boy slept again.

We may be sure that the eye that could stay open stayed open that night
as long as it could, and that the one ear listened to the sleepy song
until the song got too low to be heard, until it was too tender to be
felt vibrating along those soft arms, until Fionn was asleep again, with
a new picture in his little head and a new notion to ponder on.

The mother of himself! His own mother!

But when he awakened she was gone.

She was going back secretly, in dread of the sons of Morna, slipping
through gloomy woods, keeping away from habitations, getting by desolate
and lonely ways to her lord in Kerry.

Perhaps it was he that was afraid of the sons of Morna, and perhaps she
loved him.

CHAPTER III

THE women druids, his guardians, belonged to his father's people.
Bovmall was Uail's sister, and, consequently, Fionn's aunt. Only such
a blood-tie could have bound them to the clann-Baiscne, for it is not
easy, having moved in the world of court and camp, to go hide with a
baby in a wood; an