f Goll's men find you
here they will slay you. We have cherished the blood of Cumhal," they
said, "and now our work is done. Go, and may blessing and victory go
with you." So Finn departed with naught but his weapons and his
hunting gear, very sorrowful at leaving the wise and loving friends
who had fostered his childhood; but deep in his heart was a wild and
fierce delight at the thought of the trackless ways he would travel,
and the wonders he would see; and all the future looked to him as
beautiful and dim as the mists that fill a mountain glen under the
morning sun.

Now after the death of Cumhal, his brother Crimmal and a few others of
the aged warriors of the Fianna, who had not fallen in the fight at
Cnucha, fled away into Connacht, and lived there in the deepest
recesses of a great forest, where they hoped the conquerors might
never find them. Here they built themselves a poor dwelling of tree
branches, plastered with mud and roofed with reeds from the lake, and
here they lived on what game they could kill or snare in the wild
wood; and harder and harder it grew, as age and feebleness crept on
them, to find enough to eat, or to hew wood for their fire. In this
retreat, never having seen the friendly face of man, they were one day
startled to hear voices and the baying of hounds approaching them
through the wood, and they thought that the sons of Morna were upon
them at last, and that their hour of doom was at hand. Soon they
perceived a company of youths coming towards their hut, with one in
front who seemed to be their leader. Taller he was by a head than the
rest, broad shouldered, and with masses of bright hair clustering
round his forehead, and he carried in his hand a large bag made of
some delicate skin and stained in patterns of red and blue. The old
men thought when they saw him of a saying there was about the mighty
Lugh, who was brother to the wife of Cumhal, that when he came among
his army as they mustered for battle, men felt as though they beheld
the rising of the sun. As they came near, the young men halted and
looked upon the elders with pity, for their clothing of skins was
ragged and the weapons they strove to hold were rusted and blunt, and
except for their proud bearing and the fire in their old eyes they
looked more like aged and worthless slaves in the household of a
niggardly lord than men who had once been the flower of the fighting
men of Erinn.

But the tall youth stepped in front of