r thought of food, or of drink, or of sleep. Even the
horses listened to the song as the people did. Day and night they
stood there, and many days and nights, and no hunger came upon them,
and they felt no cold and no heat, and no wind and no wet.

"But the time came when the enchantment that was upon them compelled
the four white swans to leave the place. They rose up into the air and
flew away and out of sight into the sky. Then the King and his people,
and Lir and his people, went back to their castles, and they never saw
the four white swans again.

"The four white swans flew to Loch Derg, and there for many years they
swam on the lake, and fed and slept among the rushes along the shores.
In the summer the lake was pleasant and cool, the air was clear and
mild, the sky was blue, and the sun was bright and beautiful. Then
Fair-shoulder and her brothers forgot that they were unhappy. They
sang songs to one another and scarcely remembered that they had ever
been anything but swans, swimming on this peaceful water. But when the
winter came and the ice was all around, and the wind from the north
blew the snow against them, so that it froze among their feathers and
they could scarcely move, they were so stiff and so cold--then they
remembered how happy they had been in their father's castle. They
could not sing now--not even sad songs. They only longed to have their
human shape again and to be back in their old home.

"But after many, many years more had passed they ceased to wish for
home. They had been swans so long now that it did not seem to them
that they had ever been anything else. When the winter came again and
again and again, and the days of chilling storm and the nights of
freezing darkness were upon them, the poor brothers longed for nothing
but the end of it all. The thought of the old castle hall, with its
bright fires and its feasts and its music of minstrels and its dances
and its games, was only another pain to them, and they wished only to
die and to leave their sorrows.

"Then they crowded close together, to be as warm as they could, and
Fair-shoulder tried to spread her wings over her brothers, to keep the
storm from them. She tried to comfort them, and she told them again
and again the story that she had heard from the people who stood by
the lake to hear them sing, the story that the King had told, that,
after many hundreds of years, strange men should come across the sea
to Erin--men with shaven