began to fall the quarry was pulled down, and Oisin cut its throat with his hunting-knife.  Long it seemed to him since he had felt glad and weary as he felt now, and since the woodland air with its odours of pine and mint and wild garlic had tasted so sweet in his mouth; and truly it was longer than he knew.  But when he bade make ready the wood-oven for their meal, and build a bothy of boughs for their repose, Niam led him seven steps apart and seven to the left hand, and yet seven back to the place where they had killed the deer, and lo, there rose before him a stately Dun with litten windows and smoke drifting above its roof.  When they entered, there was a table spread for a great company, and cooks and serving-men busy about a wide hearth where roast and boiled meats of every sort were being prepared.  Casks of Greek wine stood open around the walls, and cups of gold were on the board.  So they all ate and drank their sufficiency, and all night Oisin and Niam slept on a bed softer than swans-down in a chamber no less fair than that which they had in the City of the Land of Youth.

Next day, at the first light of dawn, they were on foot; and soon again the forest rang to the baying of hounds and the music of the hunting-horn.  Oisin’s steed bore him all day, tireless and swift as before, and again the quarry fell at night’s approach, and again a palace rose in the wilderness for their night’s entertainment, and all things in it even more abundant and more sumptuous than before.  And so for seven days they fared in that forest, and seven stags were slain.  Then Oisin grew wearied of hunting, and as he plunged his sharp black hunting-knife into the throat of the last stag, he thought of the sword of magic temper that hung idle by his side in the City of Youth, or rested from its golden nail in his bed-chamber, and he said to Niam, “Has thy father never a foe to tame, never a wrong to avenge?  Surely the peasant is no man whose hand forgets the plough, nor the warrior whose hand forgets the sword hilt.”  Niam looked on him strangely for a while and as if she did not understand his words, or sought some meaning in them which yet she feared to find.  But at last she said, “If deeds of arms be thy desire, Oisin, thou shalt have thy sufficiency ere long.”  And so they rode home, and slept that night in the palace of the City of Youth.

At daybreak on the following morn Niam roused Oisin, and she buckled on him his golden-hilted sword and his corselet of blue steel inlaid with gold.  Then he put on his head a steel and gold helmet with dragon crest, and slung on his back a shield of bronze wrought all over with cunning hammer-work of serpentine lines that swelled and sank upon the surface, and coiled in mazy knots, or flowed in long sweeping curves like waves of the sea when they gather might and volume for their leap upon the sounding shore.  In the glimmering dawn, through the empty streets of the fair city, they rode forth alone and took their way