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 THE SLUMBER OF FIONN

Donegal there is a hill, lifting itself over a bog filled with the bleached grey stumps of trees, the dead remains of a forest that was there thousands of years ago.

It is many, many years now since a man was walking through the valley at the foot of the hill, searching for little rare plants and herbs that grow in boggy places and over lonely mountains. After a time he sat down to rest, and casting his eyes over the hillside saw, quite near to the summit, a small dark cleft in the mountain, which he never remembered to have seen before. As he sat looking at it he remembered the legends his mother had told him, when he was a child, about this mountain: how there were mysterious beings dwelling in vast caves inside it, and that the entrance to the caves

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