so that it would not kill people out of mere spitefulness. It
had come from Faery, out of the Shi' of Aillen mac Midna, and it would
be brought back again later on between the same man's shoulder-blades.

What tales that man could tell a boy, and what questions a boy could ask
him. He would have known a thousand tricks, and because our instinct is
to teach, and because no man can keep a trick from a boy, he would show
them to Fionn.

There was the marsh too; a whole new life to be learned; a complicated,
mysterious, dank, slippery, reedy, treacherous life, but with its own
beauty and an allurement that could grow on one, so that you could
forget the solid world and love only that which quaked and gurgled.

In this place you may swim. By this sign and this you will know if it is
safe to do so, said Fiacuil mac Cona; but in this place, with this sign
on it and that, you must not venture a toe.

But where Fionn would venture his toes his ears would follow.

There are coiling weeds down there, the robber counselled him; there are
thin, tough, snaky binders that will trip you and grip you, that will
pull you and will not let you go again until you are drowned; until
you are swaying and swinging away below, with outstretched arms, with
outstretched legs, with a face all stares and smiles and jockeyings,
gripped in those leathery arms, until there is no more to be gripped of
you even by them.

"Watch these and this and that," Fionn would have been told, "and always
swim with a knife in your teeth."

He lived there until his guardians found out where he was and came after
him. Fiacuil gave him up to them, and he was brought home again to
the woods of Slieve Bloom, but he had gathered great knowledge and new
supplenesses.

The sons of Morna left him alone for a long time. Having made their
essay they grew careless.

"Let him be," they said. "He will come to us when the time comes."

But it is likely too that they had had their own means of getting
information about him. How he shaped? what muscles he had? and did
he spring clean from the mark or had he to get off with a push? Fionn
stayed with his guardians and hunted for them. He could run a deer down
and haul it home by the reluctant skull. "Come on, Goll," he would say
to his stag, or, lifting it over a tussock with a tough grip on the
snout, "Are you coming, bald Cona'n, or shall I kick you in the neck?"

The time must have been nigh when he would think of takin