y stare taking in all that could be seen; Cona'n's
grim eye raking the women's faces while his tongue raked them again; the
Rough mac Morna shouldering here and there in the house and about it,
with maybe a hatchet in his hand, and Art Og coursing further afield and
vowing that if the cub was there he would find him.

CHAPTER VI

But Fionn was gone. He was away, bound with his band of poets for the
Galtees.

It is likely they were junior poets come to the end of a year's
training, and returning to their own province to see again the people at
home, and to be wondered at and exclaimed at as they exhibited bits of
the knowledge which they had brought from the great schools. They would
know tags of rhyme and tricks about learning which Fionn would hear of;
and now and again, as they rested in a glade or by the brink of a river,
they might try their lessons over. They might even refer to the ogham
wands on which the first words of their tasks and the opening lines of
poems were cut; and it is likely that, being new to these things, they
would talk of them to a youngster, and, thinking that his wits could be
no better than their own, they might have explained to him how ogham was
written. But it is far more likely that his women guardians had already
started him at those lessons.

Still this band of young bards would have been of infinite interest to
Fionn, not on account of what they had learned, but because of what they
knew. All the things that he should have known as by nature: the look,
the movement, the feeling of crowds; the shouldering and intercourse of
man with man; the clustering of houses and how people bore themselves
in and about them; the movement of armed men, and the homecoming look
of wounds; tales of births, and marriages and deaths; the chase with its
multitudes of men and dogs; all the noise, the dust, the excitement of
mere living. These, to Fionn, new come from leaves and shadows and the
dipple and dapple of a wood, would have seemed wonderful; and the tales
they would have told of their masters, their looks, fads, severities,
sillinesses, would have been wonderful also.

That band should have chattered like a rookery.

They must have been young, for one time a Leinsterman came on them, a
great robber named Fiacuil mac Cona, and he killed the poets. He chopped
them up and chopped them down. He did not leave one poeteen of them
all. He put them out of the world and out of life, so that they st