Page:Celtic Stories by Edward Thomas.djvu/84

 them he saw that they were not; for they reached only to the gold clasp in his instep. They were kind and courteous and they spoke Irish, but they looked up and wondered. He questioned them about Finn and Oscar and the rest.

'We have heard of Finn,' they said. 'He was a wise and generous king in Ireland once upon a time. The poets tell of him and his companions. There were great men in those days and the Fena were great amongst them. The poets sing of them. Finn, they say, is dead long ago, and his brothers and sons and grandsons and companions are all dead. They were great men, heroes taller than we, every one of them as tall as yourself, but they are all dead of their wounds. All except one, as the poets say. He was one of the sons of Finn named Ossian. He left his father and all that company to go with a maiden to Tirnanoge. He said that he would come back, but he never did. They sought him, but before they could find him they were dead. But for the poets they would be forgotten…'

'Poets?' said Ossian, in sorrow and in anger. 'What poets can there be if Fergus be dead and Ossian in Tirnanoge?'

His heart was too heavy to be long angry with these little images of men. He turned away his horse and rode on to the well-known places of battle and hunt and feast. Finn's palace was the home of winds and birds above, of chickweeds and nettles below. The cooking places of the Fena still scarred the high moors, but the heroes were gone. No men had seen them. They could only show him writings containing the names of Finn, Ossian, Fergus, Oscar, Gaul, Dermat, and the rest. Wherever he went he heard about these poems instead of the champions. Men stared at him, but none