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 Bring axes and hew down that tree. Why should it be left standing when it is dead?"

The men brought axes and began to cut down the tree, and as they shook it to see whether it would soon fall a bleached and gigantic skull rolled out of a forked branch, and they wondered how it came there. They continued their cutting, and soon from the hollow heart of the tree a white vapour arose, like the mist that hangs over marshy meadows on a hot summer evening. When it reached the men one after another fell dead to the ground, until eighteen were lying there. The others, seeing their companions fall, ran away from the deadly mist; but they did not escape altogether, for the poisonous vapour entered their eyes, and they were blinded for ever.

Manannan, who alone remained uninjured by the enchanted mist, picked up the skull, and when he saw the empty eye-socket in the middle of its forehead he remembered that, long years before, Lugh Lam-Fada had hidden the head of Balor of the Death-giving Eye in a tree. Seeing that the venom from the