Diarmait's sword, and with a great bound leaped into the well: down he went, leaving his antagonist wondering at his disappearance and smarting from his wounds. Diarmait then walked towards the end of a great forest that stretched from the mountain to the plain, and, espying a herd of speckled deer, he killed one of them; then he lit a fire and cooked a part of the deer's flesh, which, together with some draughts of clear water from the drinking-horn, formed his supper. He slept soundly, and his breakfast was of the same description as his previous meal. When he had done, he went to the well and found the gruagach there awaiting him: he was more wroth than the first day, as he now complained that Diarmait had hunted on his land and killed some of his speckled deer; so they fought as before and with the same result, that the gruagach disappeared at dusk into the well. This scene repeated itself each day till the evening of the fourth, when Diarmait, finding his antagonist drawing towards the well, threw his arms round him, and both sank into the well. At length they reached the bottom in Tír fa Tonn, or the Land beneath the Billow, and the gruagach, disengaging himself, left Diarmait alone in a strange land, where, however, he fell in with the gruagach's brother, who complained that he had been disinherited by the gruagach, or the Knight of the Fountain as he called him. So Diarmait allied himself with the former, and they made war on the Knight of the Fountain, who was ultimately routed and slain by the hero of the tale.
A story of which Diarmait was a principal figure required him of course to be victorious in his contests, and this applied with special force to one in which the
