had no M'Swyne been found
bold enough to find the black cat and kill him? Could it be so hard a
thing to kill a black cat? the little fellow thought.

"I'd kill him myself if only I had the chance," he said one day; and
when he said that his father laughed.

"Ay, my lad, you might kill him if you had the chance--but how would you
get the chance?" he asked him. "Do you think the magician would be fool
enough to leave his watch over the lough and put himself in your way?
Kill him? Yes, we could any of us kill him if we could catch him; but
three hundred years have passed away and nobody has ever caught him
yet."

"Well, I may do it some day, when I am grown a man," Dermot said.

So he went on dreaming over the old legend, and weaving out of his own
brain an ending to it. What if it should be, indeed, his lot to awake
Eileen from her enchanted sleep? He used to wander often by the shores
of the dark little lough and gaze into the shadowy waters. Many a time,
too, he would sail across them, leaning down over his boat's side, to
try in vain to catch some glimpse of the buried castle's walls or
towers. Once or twice--it might have been mere fancy--it seemed to him
as if he saw some dark thing below the surface, and he would cry aloud,
"The cat! I see the black cat!" But they only laughed at him when he
returned home and said this. "It was only a big fish at the bottom of
the water, my boy," his father would reply.

When he was a boy he talked of this story often and was never weary of
asking questions concerning it; but presently, as he grew older, he grew
more reserved and shy, and when he spoke about Eileen the color used to
come into his cheek. "Why, boy, are you falling in love with her?" his
father said to him one day. "Are there not unbewitched maidens enough to
please you on the face of the earth, but you must take a fancy to a
bewitched one lying asleep at the bottom of the lough?" and he laughed
aloud at him. After that day Dermot never spoke of Eileen in his
father's hearing. But although he ceased to speak of her, yet only the
more did he think and dream about her; and the older he grew, the less
did he seem to care for any of those unbewitched maidens of whom his
father had talked; and the only maiden of whom he thought with love and
longing was this one who lay asleep in the enchanted castle in the
lough.

So the years passed on, and in time Dermot's father died, and the young
man became chieftain of his c