that not even my dear father would keep me from her side for long. Then I mounted the white horse, and swifter than the wind I travelled the waves until, in the soft clear dawn of a spring morning, I saw the cliffs and green hills of my country appear.
"I came to the silver-white sands of Berramain, where I had left my father and comrades, but no sign of their presence or any dwellings there could I see. I shouted the war-cry of the Fianna, and listened and waited for the sound of my father's mighty tread and the hounds' tumult, but no sound, except the lapping of the wavelets and the rustling of the leaves, disturbed the silence.
"Across plains and over hills I continued my journey, marvelling that the country should have changed so much during my short absence, for many of the thick forests I so well remembered hunting through with Fionn and the Fians had disappeared, and in some places there was hardly a tree left standing. At last I stopped before a group of puny men and women, and questioned them.
"'Tell me,' said I, 'where Fionn and his
