swans and
depart again to their homes; and most of all came their own friends
and fellow-pupils from the Hill of the White Field. No such music as
theirs, say the historians of ancient times, ever was heard in Erinn,
for foes who heard it were at peace, and men stricken with pain or
sickness felt their ills no more; and the memory of it remained with
them when they went away, so that a great peace and sweetness and
gentleness was in the land of Erinn for those three hundred years that
the swans abode in the waters of Derryvaragh.

But one day Fionnuala said to her brethren, "Do ye know, my dear
ones, that the end of our time here is come, all but this night only?"
Then great sorrow and distress overcame them, for in the converse with
their father and kinsfolk and friends they had half forgotten that
they were no longer men, and they loved their home on Loch
Derryvaragh, and feared the angry waves of the cold northern sea. But
early next day they came to the lough-side to speak with Bov the Red
and with their father, and to bid them farewell, and Fionnuala sang to
them her last lament. Then the four swans rose in the air and flew
northward till they were seen no more, and great was the grief among
those they left behind; and Bov the Red let it be proclaimed
throughout the length and breadth of Erin that no man should
henceforth presume to kill a swan, lest it might chance to be one of
the children of Lir.

Far different was the dwelling-place which the swans now came to, from
that which they had known on Loch Derryvaragh. On either side of them,
to north and south, stretched a wide coast far as the eye could see,
beset with black rocks and great precipices, and by it ran fiercely
the salt, bitter tides of an ever-angry sea, cold, grey, and misty;
and their hearts sank to behold it and to think that there they must
abide for three hundred years.

Ere long, one night, there came a thick murky tempest upon them, and
Fionnuala said, "In this black and violent night, my brothers, we may
be driven apart from each other; let us therefore appoint a
meeting-place where we may come together again when the tempest is
overpast." And they settled to meet at the Seal Rock, for this rock
they had now all learned to know.

By midnight the hurricane descended upon the Straits of Moyle, and the
waves roared upon the coast with a deafening noise, and thunder
bellowed from the sky, and lightning was all the light they had. The
swans