Queen:  Is it true something was threatened?

King:  How would I know is anything true, and the world so full of lies as it is?

Nurse:  That is so.  He might have been wrong in his foretelling.  What is he in the finish but an old prophecy?

Dall Glic:  Is it of Fintan you are saying that?

Queen:  And who, will you tell me, is Fintan?

Dall Glic:  Anyone that never heard tell of Fintan never heard anything at all.

Queen:  His name was not up on the tablets of big men at the King of Alban’s Court, or of Britain.

Nurse:  Ah, sure in those countries they are without religion or belief.

Queen:  Is it that there was a prophecy?

King:  Don’t mind it.  What are prophecies?  Don’t we hear them every day of the week?  And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.

Queen:  (To Dall Glic).  I must get to the root of this, and the handle.  Who, now, is Fintan?

Dall Glic: He is an astrologer, and understanding the nature of the stars.

Nurse: He wore out in his lifetime three eagles and three palm trees and three earthen dykes.  It is down in a cleft of the rocks beyond he has his dwelling presently, the way he can be watching the stars through the daytime.

Dall Glic: He prophesied in a prophecy, and it is written in clean letters in the King’s yew-tree box.

King: It is best to keep it out of sight.  It being to be, it will be; and, if not, where’s the use troubling our mind?

Queen: Sound it out to me.

Dall Glic:  (Looking from window and drawing curtain.) There is no story in the world is worse to me or more pitiful; I wouldn’t wish any person to hear.

Nurse: Oh, take care it would come to the ears of my darling Nu!

Dall Glic: It is said by himself and the heavens that in a year from this day the King’s daughter will be brought away and devoured by a scaly Green Dragon that will come from the North of the World.

Queen: A Dragon!  I thought you were talking of some danger.  I wouldn’t give in to dragons.  I never saw one.  I’m not in dread of beasts unless it might be a mouse in the night-time!

King: Put it out of mind.  It is likely anyway that the world will soon be ended the way it is.

Queen:  I will send and search out this astrologer and will question him.

Dall Glic:  You have not far to search.  He is outside at the kitchen door at this minute, and as if questioning after something, and it a half-score and seven years since I knew him to come out of his cave.

King:  Do not!  He might waken up the Dragon and put him in mind of the girl, for to make his own foretelling come true.

Nurse:  Ah, such a thing cannot be!  The poor innocent child! (Weeps.)