Yet what befell him afterwards is known.  As his birth was strange so was his end, for he saw the wonders of the Land of Youth with mortal eyes and lived to tell them with mortal lips.

When the white horse with its riders reached the sea it ran lightly over the waves and soon the green woods and headlands of Erinn faded out of sight.  And now the sun shone fiercely down, and the riders passed into a golden haze in which Oisin lost all knowledge of where he was or if sea or dry land were beneath his horse’s hoofs.  But strange sights sometimes appeared to them in the mist, for towers and palace gateways loomed up and disappeared, and once a hornless doe bounded by them chased by a white hound with one red ear, and again they saw a young maid ride by on a brown steed, bearing a golden apple in her hand, and close behind her followed a young horseman on a white steed, a purple cloak floating at his back and a gold-hilted sword in his hand.  And Oisin would have asked the princess who and what these apparitions were, but Niam bade him ask nothing nor seem to notice any phantom they might see until they were come to the Land of Youth.

[Illustration:  “They rode up to a stately palace”]

At last the sky gloomed above them, and Niam urged their steed faster.  The wind lashed them with pelting rain, thunder roared across the sea and lightning blazed, but they held on their way till at length they came once more into a region of calm and sunshine.  And now Oisin saw before him a shore of yellow sand, lapped by the ripples of a summer sea.  Inland, there rose before his eye wooded hills amid which he could discern the roofs and towers of a noble city.  The white horse bore them swiftly to the shore and Oisin and the maiden lighted down.  And Oisin marvelled at everything around him, for never was water so blue or trees so stately as those he saw, and the forest was alive with the hum of bees and the song of birds, and the creatures that are wild in other lands, the deer and the red squirrel and the wood-dove, came, without fear, to be caressed.  Soon, as they went forward, the walls of a city came in sight, and folk began to meet them on the road, some riding, some afoot, all of whom were either youths or maidens, all looking as joyous as if the morning of happy life had just begun for them, and no old or feeble person was to be seen.  Niam led her companion through a towered gateway built of white and red marble, and there they were met by a glittering company of a hundred riders on black steeds and a hundred on white, and Oisin mounted a black horse and Niam her white, and they rode up to a stately palace where the King of the Land of Youth had his dwelling.  And there he received them, saying in a loud voice that all the folk could hear, “Welcome, Oisin, son of Finn.  Thou art come to the Land of Youth, where sorrow and weariness and death shall never touch thee.  This thou hast won by thy faithfulness and valour and by the songs that thou hast made for the men of