ho knows what might take place
within the twelvemonth that is coming?

_King:_ Ah, don't be talking about it. Maybe
it never might come to pass.

_Dall Glic_: It will come to pass, if there is truth
in the clouds of sky.

_King_: It will not be for a year, anyway. There'll
be many an ebbing and flowing of the tide within
a year.

_Queen_: What at all are you talking about?

_King_: Ah, where's the use of talking too
much.

_Queen_: Making riddles you are, and striving
to keep the meaning from your comrade, that is
myself.

_King_: It's best not be thinking about the thing
you would not wish, and maybe it might never
come around at all. To strive to forget a threat
yourself, it might maybe be forgotten by the
universe.

_Queen_: Is it true something was threatened?

_King_: How would I know is anything true,
and the world so full of lies as it is?

_Nurse_: That is so. He might have been wrong
in his foretelling. What is he in the finish but an
old prophecy?

_Dall Glic_: Is it of Fintan you are saying that?

_Queen_: And who, will you tell me, is Fintan?

_Dall Glic_: Anyone that never heard tell of
Fintan never heard anything at all.

_Queen_: His name was not up on the tablets
of big men at the King of Alban's Court, or of
Britain.

_Nurse_: Ah, sure in those countries they are
without religion or belief.

_Queen_: Is it that there was a prophecy?

_King_: Don't mind it. What are prophecies?
Don't we hear them every day of the week? And
if one comes true there may be seven blind and
come to nothing.

_Queen: (To Dall Glic_). I must get to the root
of this, and the handle. Who, now, is Fintan?

_Dall Glic:_ He is an astrologer, and understanding
the nature of the stars.

_Nurse:_ He wore out in his lifetime three eagles
and three palm trees and three earthen dykes.
It is down in a cleft of the rocks beyond he has
his dwelling presently, the way he can be watching
the stars through the daytime.

_Dall Glic:_ He prophesied in a prophecy, and
it is written in clean letters in the King's yew-tree
box.

_King:_ It is best to keep it out of sight. It
being to be, it will be; and, if not, where's the
use troubling our mind?

_Queen:_ Sound it out to me.

_Dall Glic: (Looking from window and drawing
curtain.)_ There is no story in the world is worse
to me or more pitiful; I wouldn't wish any person
to hear.

_Nurse:_ Oh, take care it would come to the
ears of my darling Nu!

_