busy master.

It was not from the Shi', however, that assistance came to Fionn.

CHAPTER XIII

He marched through the successive fortifications until he came to the
outer, great wall, the boundary of the city, and when he had passed this
he was on the wide plain of Tara.

Other than himself no person was abroad, for on the night of the Feast
of Samhain none but a madman would quit the shelter of a house even if
it were on fire; for whatever disasters might be within a house would be
as nothing to the calamities without it.

The noise of the banquet was not now audible to Fionn--it is possible,
however, that there was a shamefaced silence in the great hall--and the
lights of the city were hidden by the successive great ramparts. The sky
was over him; the earth under him; and than these there was nothing, or
there was but the darkness and the wind.

But darkness was not a thing to terrify him, bred in the nightness of
a wood and the very fosterling of gloom; nor could the wind afflict his
ear or his heart. There was no note in its orchestra that he had not
brooded on and become, which becoming is magic. The long-drawn moan of
it; the thrilling whisper and hush; the shrill, sweet whistle, so thin
it can scarcely be heard, and is taken more by the nerves than by the
ear; the screech, sudden as a devil's yell and loud as ten thunders; the
cry as of one who flies with backward look to the shelter of leaves and
darkness; and the sob as of one stricken with an age-long misery, only
at times remembered, but remembered then with what a pang! His ear
knew by what successions they arrived, and by what stages they grew and
diminished. Listening in the dark to the bundle of noises which make a
noise he could disentangle them and assign a place and a reason to each
gradation of sound that formed the chorus: there was the patter of a
rabbit, and there the scurrying of a hare; a bush rustled yonder,
but that brief rustle was a bird; that pressure was a wolf, and this
hesitation a fox; the scraping yonder was but a rough leaf against bark,
and the scratching beyond it was a ferret's claw.

Fear cannot be where knowledge is, and Fionn was not fearful.

His mind, quietly busy on all sides, picked up one sound and dwelt on
it. "A man," said Fionn, and he listened in that direction, back towards
the city.

A man it was, almost as skilled in darkness as Fionn himself "This is no
enemy," Fionn thought; "his walking is open."