a trifle like that.  They bound up the wound and healed him in a cauldron of cure; but warned him never to get excited or over-exert himself, or the brain-ball would come out and he would die; barring such accidents, he would do splendidly.  And so he did for some years.  Then one day a darkness came over the world, and he put his druids to finding out the cause of it.  They told him they saw in their vision three crosses on a hill in the east of the world, and three men nailed on them; and the man in the middle with the likeness of the Son of God.  With that the battle-fury came on Conchobar, and he fell to destroying the trees of the forest with his sword.  “Oh that I were there!” he cried; “thus would I deal with his enemies.”  With the excitement and over-exertion, out came the brain-ball, and he died.  And if God Almighty would not take Conchobar MacNessa, pagan as he was, into heaven for a thing like that,—­sure, God Almighty was not half such a decent kindly creature as the Irish monk who invented the yarn.

So nothing comes down to us that has not passed the censorship of a race-proud priesthood, with perhaps never a drop of the wine of true wisdom in them, to help them discriminate and truth to shine through what they were passing on; but still, with a great deal of the milk of human kindness as a substitute, so far as it might be.  They treasured the literary remains of druid days; liberally twisting them, to be sure, into consonance with Christian ideas of history and the fitness of things; but still they treasured them, and drew from them inspiration.  Thus the whole past comes down euhemerized, cooked, and touched up.  It comes down very glorious,—­because the strongest feeling in Irish hearts was Irishism, race-consciousness.  Whereas the Latin Church was fiercely against antiquity and all its monuments, the Celtic Church in Ireland was anxious above all things to preserve Celtic antiquity,—­having first brought it into line with the one true faith.  The records had to be kept,—­and made to tally with the Bible.  The godhood of the Gods had to be covered away, and you had to treat them as if they had been respectable children of Adam,—­more or less respectable, at any rate.  A descent from Noah had to be found for the legendary kings and heroes; and for every event a date corresponding with that of someone in the Bible.  Above all, you had to pack the whole Irish past into the few thousand years since Noah came out of the Ark.—­You get a glimpse in Wales of the struggle there was between Hebrao-Christian chronology and the Celtic sense of the age of the world:  in the pedigree of an ancient family, where, it is said, about half way down the line this entry occurs after one of the names:  “In his time Adam was expelled from Paradise.”  In Ireland, indeed, there was at least one man from before the Flood living in historic times:  Fintan, whom, with others, Noah sent into the western world while the Ark was building.  Here is one of Fintan’s poems: