Page:Heroes of the dawn.djvu/122

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94
HEROES OF THE DAWN

shaped itself before his eyes. But in the morning the mist cleared from their minds, and only Fionn and Oisin and Caeilté, and one or two others, remembered that during the night they had been taken away to Tir-na-noge, the happy land where neither sorrow nor death nor anything unlovely has place.

For a year, or perhaps a little more, the three wonder-working princes of Norway were with Fionn wherever he went, and no man sought to intrude upon their solitude at night. They always camped apart, and at the dark of every day would surround their camp with a magic wall of fire, which flamed up high from the ground, hiding them from the sight of every one. Then one night it fell to Dorm and Dubhan, the King of Ulster's sons, to keep guard while the Fians slept. Three times they encircled the camp, and at the end of the third round they stood watching the fiery wall that guarded the camp of the three men.

"It is a curious thing," said Donn, "that for a year or more these young men with their hound have been with us, and no one has ever