a
trifle like that. They bound up the wound and healed him in a
cauldron of cure; but warned him never to get excited or
over-exert himself, or the brain-ball would come out and he would
die; barring such accidents, he would do splendidly. And so he
did for some years. Then one day a darkness came over the world,
and he put his druids to finding out the cause of it. They told
him they saw in their vision three crosses on a hill in the east
of the world, and three men nailed on them; and the man in the
middle with the likeness of the Son of God. With that the
battle-fury came on Conchobar, and he fell to destroying the
trees of the forest with his sword. "Oh that I were there!" he
cried; "thus would I deal with his enemies." With the excitement
and over-exertion, out came the brain-ball, and he died. And if
God Almighty would not take Conchobar MacNessa, pagan as he was,
into heaven for a thing like that,--sure, God Almighty was not
half such a decent kindly creature as the Irish monk who invented
the yarn.

So nothing comes down to us that has not passed the censorship of
a race-proud priesthood, with perhaps never a drop of the wine of
true wisdom in them, to help them discriminate and truth to shine
through what they were passing on; but still, with a great deal
of the milk of human kindness as a substitute, so far as it
might be. They treasured the literary remains of druid days;
liberally twisting them, to be sure, into consonance with
Christian ideas of history and the fitness of things; but still
they treasured them, and drew from them inspiration. Thus the
whole past comes down euhemerized, cooked, and touched up. It
comes down very glorious,--because the strongest feeling in Irish
hearts was Irishism, race-consciousness. Whereas the Latin
Church was fiercely against antiquity and all its monuments, the
Celtic Church in Ireland was anxious above all things to preserve
Celtic antiquity,--having first brought it into line with the one
true faith. The records had to be kept,--and made to tally with
the Bible. The godhood of the Gods had to be covered away, and
you had to treat them as if they had been respectable children of
Adam,--more or less respectable, at any rate. A descent from
Noah had to be found for the legendary kings and heroes; and for
every event a date corresponding with that of someone in the
Bible. Above all, you had to pack the whole Irish past into
the few thousand years since