in a silken
pall; and knowing not who this might be they dug a grave in the grassy
hill, and there laid the stranger, and laid the green sods over him
again.

There still sleeps Cormac the King, and neither Ogham-lettered stone
nor sculptured cross marks his solitary grave. But he lies in the
place where he would be, of which a poet of the Gael in our day has
written:--

"A tranquil spot: a hopeful sound
Comes from the ever-youthful stream,
And still on daisied mead and mound
The dawn delays with tenderer beam.

"Round Cormac, spring renews her buds:
In march perpetual by his side
Down come the earth-fresh April floods,
And up the sea-fresh salmon glide;

"And life and time rejoicing run
From age to age their wonted way;
But still he waits the risen sun,
For still 'tis only dawning day."[39]

[39] These lines are taken from Sir S. Ferguson's noble poem,
_The Burial of King Cormac_, from which I have also borrowed
some of the details of the foregoing narrative.

* * * * *

Notes on the Sources

_The Story of the Children of Lir_ and _The Quest of the Sons of
Turenn_ are two of the three famous and popular tales entitled "The
Three Sorrows of Storytelling." The third is the _Tragedy of the Sons
of Usna_, rendered by Miss Eleanor Hull in her volume CUCHULAIN. I
have taken the two stories which are given here from the versions in
modern Irish published by the Society for the Preservation of the
Irish Language, with notes and translation. Neither of them is found
in any very early MS., but their subject-matter certainly goes back to
very primitive times.

_The Secret of Labra_ is taken from Keating's FORUS FEASA AR EIRINN,
edited with translation by the Rev. P.S. Dineen for the Irish Texts
Society, vol. i. p. 172.

_The Carving of mac Datho's Boar_. This is a clean, fierce, fighting
story, notable both for its intensely dramatic _denouement_, and for
the complete absence from it of the magical or supernatural element
which is so common a feature in Gaelic tales. It has been edited and
translated from one MS. by Dr Kuno Meyer, in _Hibernica Minora_
(ANECDOTA OXONIENSIA), 1894, and translated from THE BOOK OF LEINSTER
(twelfth century) in Leahy's HEROIC ROMANCES.

_The Vengeance of Mesgedra_. This story, as I have given it, is a
combination of two tales, _The Siege of Howth_ and _The Death of King
Conor_