the Christian era, and who have
left so deep an impress upon the Celtic mind and its myths.

"Yes," said Larry again, "the Tuatha De--the Ancient Ones who had
spells that could compel Mananan, who is the spirit of all the seas,
an' Keithor, who is the god of all green living things, an' even
Hesus, the unseen god, whose pulse is the pulse of all the firmament;
yes, an' Orchil too, who sits within the earth an' weaves with the
shuttle of mystery and her three looms of birth an' life an'
death--even Orchil would weave as they commanded!"

He was silent--then:

"They are of them--the mighty ones--why else would I have bent my knee
to them as I would have to the spirit of my dead mother? Why else
would Lakla, whose gold-brown hair is the hair of Eilidh the Fair,
whose mouth is the sweet mouth of Deirdre, an' whose soul walked with
mine ages agone among the fragrant green myrtle of Erin, serve them?"
he whispered, eyes full of dream.

"Have you any idea how they got here?" I asked, not unreasonably.

"I haven't thought about that," he replied somewhat testily. "But at
once, me excellent man o' wisdom, a number occur to me. One of them is
that this little party of three might have stopped here on their way
to Ireland, an' for good reasons of their own decided to stay a while;
an' another is that they might have come here afterward, havin' got
wind of what those rats out there were contemplatin', and have stayed
on the job till the time was ripe to save Ireland from 'em; the rest
of the world, too, of course," he added magnanimously, "but Ireland in
particular. And do any of those reasons appeal to ye?"

I shook my head.

"Well, what do you think?" he asked wearily.

"I think," I said cautiously, "that we face an evolution of highly
intelligent beings from ancestral sources radically removed from those
through which mankind ascended. These half-human, highly developed
batrachians they call the _Akka_ prove that evolution in these
caverned spaces has certainly pursued one different path than on
earth. The Englishman, Wells, wrote an imaginative and very
entertaining book concerning an invasion of earth by Martians, and he
made his Martians enormously specialized cuttlefish. There was nothing
inherently improbable in Wells' choice. Man is the ruling animal of
earth today solely by reason of a series of accidents; under another
series spiders or ants, or even elephants, could have become the
dominant race.

"I think