s roads, or to hurling, or to nothing. And if any one comes into
the house, it's into the room he'll slip, not to see them; and as to
work, he has the garden dug to bits, and the whole place smeared with
cow dung; and such a crop as was never seen; and the alders all plaited
till they look grand. One day he went as far as the chapel; but as soon
as he got to the door he turned straight round again, as if he hadn't
power to pass it. I wonder he wouldn't get the priest to read a Mass for
him, or something; but the crop he has is grand, and you may know well
he has some to help him.' One hears many stories of the kind; and a man
whose son is believed to go out riding among them at night tells me that
he is careless about everything, and lies in bed until it is late in the
day. A doctor believes this boy to be mad. Those that are at times
'away,' as it is called, know all things, but are afraid to speak. A
countryman at Kiltartan says, 'There was one of the Lydons--John--was
away for seven years, lying in his bed, but brought away at nights, and
he knew everything; and one, Kearney, up in the mountains, a cousin of
his own, lost two hoggets, and came and told him, and he knew the very
spot where they were, and told him, and he got them back again. But
_they_ were vexed at that, and took away the power, so that he never
knew anything again, no more than another.' This wisdom is the wisdom of
the fools of the Celtic stories, that was above all the wisdom of the
wise. Lomna, the fool of Fiann, had so great wisdom that his head, cut
from his body, was still able to sing and prophesy; and a writer in the
'Encyclopaedia Britannica' writes that Tristram, in the oldest form of
the tale of Tristram and Iseult, drank wisdom, and madness the shadow of
wisdom, and not love, out of the magic cup.

The great of the old times are among the Tribes of Danu, and are kings
and queens among them. Caolte was a companion of Fiann; and years after
his death he appeared to a king in a forest, and was a flaming man, that
he might lead him in the darkness. When the king asked him who he was,
he said, 'I am your candlestick.' I do not remember where I have read
this story, and I have, maybe, half forgotten it. Niam was a beautiful
woman of the Tribes of Danu, that led Oisin to the Country of the Young,
as their country is called; I have written about her in 'The Wandering
of Usheen;' and he came back, at last, to bitterness and weariness.

Knocknarea