owing fruit felt a cheerful flow of spirits, as if he had
tasted wine or mead, and whosoever ate a sufficient number of them
was almost certain to grow younger. These things were written in the
Speckled Book of Salemina, but in druidical ink, undecipherable to all
eyes but those of the Scribe herself.

So, wishing that none should possess the secret but themselves, the Fair
Strangers set the Gilla Dacker+ to watch the fruit (putting him first
under gesa to eat none of the berries himself, since he was already
too cheerful and too young to be of much service); and thus, in their
absence, the magical tree was never left alone.

+Could be freely translated as the Slothful Button Boy.

Nevertheless, when Finola the Festive went forth to the chase one day,
she found a quicken berry glowing like a ruby in the highroad, and
Sheela plucked a second from under a gnarled thorn on the Slope of the
Chariots, and Pearla discovered a third in the curiously-compounded,
swiftly-satisfying loaf of Toma. Then the Fair Strangers became very
angry, and sent out their trusty fleet-footed couriers to scour the land
for the invaders; for they knew that none of the Dedannans would take
the berries, being under gesa not to do so. But the couriers returned,
and though they were men able to trace the trail of a fox through nine
glens and nine rivers, they could discover no proof of the presence of a
foreign foe in the mayden cantred of Devorgilla.

Then the hearts of the Fair Strangers were filled with grief and gall,
for they distrusted the couriers, and having consulted the Ard-ri, they
set forth themselves to find and conquer the invader; for the king told
them that there was one other quicken-tree, more beautiful and more
magical than that growing by the Fairy Palace, and that it was set in
another part of the bright-blooming, sweet-scented old garden,--namely,
in the heart of the labyrinthine maze of the Wise Woman of Wales; but as
no one of them, neither the Gilla Dacker nor those who pursued him, had
ever, even with the aid of the Magic Thread-Clue, reached the heart of
the maze, there was no knowledge among them of the second quicken-tree.
The king also told Sheela the Scribe, secretly, that one of his knights
had found a money-piece and a breviary in the forest of Rosnaree; and
the silver was unlike any ever used in the country of the Dedannans, and
the breviary could belong only to a pious Gael known as Loskenn of the
Bare Knees