eplied; "I have not looked at her yet, although
now I see her everywhere. I think she is a woman who would annoy me if I
married her."

"If you haven't seen her, how can you think that?"

"She has tame feet," said the youth. "I looked at them and they got
frightened. Where have you travelled from, sir?"

"I will tell you that," said the Philosopher, "if you will tell me your
name."

"It is easily told," he answered; "my name is MacCulain."

"When I came last night," said the Philosopher, "from the place of Angus
Og in the cave of the Sleepers of Erinn I was bidden say to a man named
MacCulain that The Grey of Macha had neighed in his sleep and the sword
of Laeg clashed on the floor as he turned in his slumber."

The young man leaped from the grass.

"Sir," said he in a strained voice, "I do not understand your words, but
they make my heart to dance and sing within me like a bird."

"If you listen to your heart," said the Philosopher, "you will learn
every good thing, for the heart is the fountain of wisdom tossing its
thoughts up to the brain which gives them form,"--and, so saying, he
saluted the youth and went again on his way by the curving road.

Now the day had advanced, noon was long past, and the strong sunlight
blazed ceaselessly on the world. His path was still on the high
mountains, running on for a short distance and twisting perpetually to
the right hand and to the left. One might scarcely call it a path, it
grew so narrow. Sometimes, indeed, it almost ceased to be a path, for
the grass had stolen forward inch by inch to cover up the tracks of man.
There were no hedges but rough, tumbled ground only, which was patched
by trailing bushes and stretched away in mounds and hummocks beyond the
far horizon. There was a deep silence everywhere, not painful, for where
the sun shines there is no sorrow: the only sound to be heard was the
swish of long grasses against his feet as he trod, and the buzz of an
occasional bee that came and was gone in an instant.

The Philosopher was very hungry, and he looked about on all sides to see
if there was anything he might eat. "If I were a goat or a cow," said
he, "I could eat this grass and be nourished. If I were a donkey I could
crop the hard thistles which are growing on every hand, or if I were
a bird I could feed on the caterpillars and creeping things which stir
innumerably everywhere. But a man may not eat even in the midst of
plenty, because he has departed