Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/44

30 terously, he gave an unerring cast of his knife at the raven, so that he cut one foot off it, and taking up the bird, he threw it over beside Deirdre. The girl gave a sudden start, and fell into a faint, till Levarcham came to her aid. 'Why art thou thus, dear daughter?' said she; 'thy countenance is piteous ever since yesterday.' 'A desire that I chanced to have,' said Deirdre. 'What is that desire?' said Levarcham. 'Three colours that I saw,' said Deirdre, 'the blackness of the raven, the redness of the blood, and the whiteness of the snow.' 'It is easy to satisfy thee so far,' said Levarcham; and she arose and went out immediately; and she gathered the full of a vessel of snow, and half the full of a cup of the calf's blood, and three feathers pulled out of the raven's wing, and she laid them down on the table in front of the girl. Deirdre made as though she were eating the snow, and lazily tasting the blood with the tip of the raven's feather, her nurse closely watching her the while, until Deirdre begged Levarcham to leave her alone for a time.

"So Levarcham departed, but returning again she found Deirdre shaping a ball of snow into the likeness of a man's head, and mottling it with the tip of the raven's feather out of the blood of the calf, and arranging the small black plumage upon it like hair. Until all was finished she never noticed that her nurse was scanning her.

Whose likeness is that?' said Levarcham. Deirdre started, and she said, 'I can easily destroy my work.' 'That work of thine is a great surprise to me, girl,' said the nurse, 'because it is not like thee to draw pictures of a man, and, moreover, the women of Emania were not permitted to teach thee the similitude of any man but of Conor only.' 'I saw a face in my dream,' said Deirdre, 'that was brighter of countenance than the face of the king or of Cailcin, and it was in it that I saw the three colours that troubled me, for his skin was white like snow, and the blackness of the raven was on his hair, and in his face the red tint of blood;