One day, while still a boy, he was roaming through the woods when he came to the mansion of a great lord, where many boys, sons of the chief men of Ireland, were being trained in manly arts and exercises.  He found them playing at hurling, and they invited him to join them.  He did so, but the side he was on won too easily, so they divided again, and yet again, giving fewer and fewer to Demna’s side, till at last he alone drove the ball to the goal through them all, flashing among them as a salmon among a shoal of minnows.  And then their anger and jealousy rose and grew bitter against the stranger, and instead of honouring him as gallant lads of gentle blood should have done they fell upon him with their hurling clubs and sought to kill him.  But Demna felled seven of them to the ground and put the rest to flight, and then went his way home.  When the boys told what had happened the chief asked them who it was that had defeated and routed them single-handed.  They said, “It was a tall shapely lad, and very fair (finn).”  So the name of Finn, the Fair One, clung to him thenceforth, and by that name he is known to this day.

By and by Finn gathered round him a band of youths who loved him for his strength and valour and for his generous heart, and with them he went hunting in the forests.  And Goll, and the sons of Morna, who were now captains of the Fianna under the High King, began to hear tales of him and his exploits, and they sent trackers to inquire about him, for they had an inkling of who this wonderful fair-haired youth might be.  Finn’s foster mothers heard of this.  “You must leave this place,” they said to him, “and see our faces no more, for if Goll’s men find you here they will slay you.  We have cherished the blood of Cumhal,” they said, “and now our work is done.  Go, and may blessing and victory go with you.”  So Finn departed with naught but his weapons and his hunting gear, very sorrowful at leaving the wise and loving friends who had fostered his childhood; but deep in his heart was a wild and fierce delight at the thought of the trackless ways he would travel, and the wonders he would see; and all the future looked to him as beautiful and dim as the mists that fill a mountain glen under the morning sun.

Now after the death of Cumhal, his brother Crimmal and a few others of the aged warriors of the Fianna, who had not fallen in the fight at Cnucha, fled away into Connacht, and lived there in the deepest recesses of a great forest, where they hoped the conquerors might never find them.  Here they built themselves a poor dwelling of tree branches, plastered with mud and roofed with reeds from the lake, and here they lived on what game they could kill or snare in the wild wood; and harder and harder it grew, as age and feebleness crept on them, to find enough to eat, or to hew wood for their fire.  In this retreat, never having seen the friendly face of man, they were one day startled to hear voices and the baying of