a
great jollity and tranquillity and exuberance returned to the poet.

"Ah," said he, "I had a great combat with that fish."

"Did it fight for its life?" Fionn inquired.

"It did, but that was not the fight I meant."

"You shall eat a Salmon of Knowledge too," Fionn assured him.

"You have eaten one," cried the blithe poet, "and if you make such a
promise it will be because you know."

"I promise it and know it," said Fionn, "you shall eat a Salmon of
Knowledge yet."

CHAPTER XI

He had received all that he could get from Finegas. His education was
finished and the time had come to test it, and to try all else that he
had of mind and body. He bade farewell to the gentle poet, and set out
for Tara of the Kings.

It was Samhain-tide, and the feast of Tara was being held, at which all
that was wise or skilful or well-born in Ireland were gathered together.

This is how Tara was when Tara was. There was the High King's palace
with its fortification; without it was another fortification enclosing
the four minor palaces, each of which was maintained by one of the four
provincial kings; without that again was the great banqueting hall, and
around it and enclosing all of the sacred hill in its gigantic bound ran
the main outer ramparts of Tara. From it, the centre of Ireland, four
great roads went, north, south, east, and west, and along these roads,
from the top and the bottom and the two sides of Ireland, there moved
for weeks before Samhain an endless stream of passengers.

Here a gay band went carrying rich treasure to decorate the pavilion of
a Munster lord. On another road a vat of seasoned yew, monstrous as a
house on wheels and drawn by an hundred laborious oxen, came bumping and
joggling the ale that thirsty Connaught princes would drink. On a road
again the learned men of Leinster, each with an idea in his head that
would discomfit a northern ollav and make a southern one gape and
fidget, would be marching solemnly, each by a horse that was piled high
on the back and widely at the sides with clean-peeled willow or oaken
wands, that were carved from the top to the bottom with the ogham signs;
the first lines of poems (for it was an offence against wisdom to commit
more than initial lines to writing), the names and dates of kings, the
procession of laws of Tara and of the sub-kingdoms, the names of places
and their meanings. On the brown stallion ambling peacefully yonder
there might go the warring of