Page:Celtic Stories by Edward Thomas.djvu/82

 courage. He had to stand in a pit exposed from the knees upward, and with only a shield and a hazel wand to turn aside the spears hurled at him by nine warriors together. Also he was given a short start and had to race through the forest before armed men: he could shelter himself only by tree trunks, but if wounded or caught—if even he had broken a branch in his course or unbraided his hair, or if his weapons at the end trembled in his hands—he could not become one of the Fena. He had to run at full speed and without slackening pluck a thorn out of his heel, jump a branch as high as himself, and stoop under one no higher than his knee.

His memory showed him these things, and they were curious and amusing. He did not know that they were memories. They belonged to a life so unlike that of Tirnanoge, that he saw them without knowing that he himself had once hunted with those hunters and warred beside those warriors. He laughed at some of them as at outlandish scenes. The life of Tirnanoge was all beautiful, being of a kind that men have always refused to think possible, because it was active and full of variety yet never brought death or decay, weariness or regret. This cannot easily be imagined by earthly men. They say that perfect happiness would be dull if it were possible. If they could imagine it, they would not love it so utterly when they possessed it like Ossian; many would refuse it because it wipes out the desire and the conscious memory of earth. The men of Tirnanoge remember earth without knowing what it is they are remembering, just as in dreams we may recall what we did not know had ever happened to us.

For hundreds of years Ossian lived with Niav in this forgetfulness. They had three children, two sons and a daughter, and they called the sons Finn and Oscar.