there in a flash, and he isn't there in another.
Up or down, sideways or endways, it is all one to a fish. He goes and
is gone. He twists this way and disappears the other way. He is over
you when he ought to be under you, and he is biting your toe when you
thought you were biting his tail.

You cannot catch a fish by swimming, but you can try, and Fionn tried.
He got a grudging commendation from the terrible women when he was able
to slip noiselessly in the tide, swim under water to where a wild duck
was floating and grip it by the leg.

"Qu--," said the duck, and he disappeared before he had time to get the
"-ack" out of him.

So the time went, and Fionn grew long and straight and tough like a
sapling; limber as a willow, and with the flirt and spring of a young
bird. One of the ladies may have said, "He is shaping very well, my
dear," and the other replied, as is the morose privilege of an aunt,
"He will never be as good as his father," but their hearts must have
overflowed in the night, in the silence, in the darkness, when they
thought of the living swiftness they had fashioned, and that dear fair
head.

CHAPTER V

ONE day his guardians were agitated: they held confabulations at which
Fionn was not permitted to assist. A man who passed by in the morning
had spoken to them. They fed the man, and during his feeding Fionn had
been shooed from the door as if he were a chicken. When the stranger
took his road the women went with him a short distance. As they passed
the man lifted a hand and bent a knee to Fionn.

"My soul to you, young master," he said, and as he said it, Fionn
knew that he could have the man's soul, or his boots, or his feet, or
anything that belonged to him.

When the women returned they were mysterious and whispery. They chased
Fionn into the house, and when they got him in they chased him out
again. They chased each other around the house for another whisper. They
calculated things by the shape of clouds, by lengths of shadows, by the
flight of birds, by two flies racing on a flat stone, by throwing bones
over their left shoulders, and by every kind of trick and game and
chance that you could put a mind to.

They told Fionn he must sleep in a tree that night, and they put him
under bonds not to sing or whistle or cough or sneeze until the morning.

Fionn did sneeze. He never sneezed so much in his life. He sat up in his
tree and nearly sneezed himself out of it. Flies got up his nose