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His sister, Norah, to quiet him had told him over and over again the tales which delighted him, the delight of hearing which was second only to the delight of living them over himself, when as Cuculain he kept the ford which led to Ulla, his sole hero heart matching the hosts of Meave; or as Fergus he wielded the sword of light the Druids made and gave to the champion, which in its sweep shore away the crests of the mountains; or as Brian, the ill-fated child of Turann, he went with his brothers in the ocean-sweeping boat farther than ever Columbus traveled, winning one by one in dire conflict with kings and enchanters the treasures which would appease the implacable heart of Lu.
In their impatience to see and know the mysteries of the other world, a large number of men and women of the tribes rushed towards Julyan's pyre for the purpose of departing with him and of offering to Hesus an immense hecatomb with their bodies. But Talyessin, the eldest of the druids, ordered the ewaghs to restrain and hold these faithful people back.
When wee Andrew ran away with his treasures to the Druids' stones, Mysie went into the shippen, and did her milking to some very sad thoughts. She was poisoning her heart with her own tears.
The mistletoe is a parasitic plant, and is not always nor often found on the oak, so that when it is found it is the more precious. The Druids were the teachers of morality as well as of religion.
He fully agreed with me that it must be pre-Roman, and allowed there was much to be said for the theory which ascribes it to the Druids." Alas for these premature congratulations! They were to be rudely shattered within forty-eight hours, and by a letter addressed to Captain Pond in Colonel Taubmann's handwriting:
The gigantic images constructed of osiers or covered with grass in which the Druids enclosed their victims remind us of the leafy framework in which the human representative of the tree-spirit is still so often encased.
Suetonius further speaks of druids in Anglesey, and tradition has it that in Wales and Ireland there were druids in pre-Christian times. But that druids ever existed in England or in a tithe of the places in which megalithic circles and other monuments occur is unlikely.
Why, a parity of practice, in all departments, would bring back the Plague in two summers, and the Druids in a century! Walking faster under my share of this public injury, I overturned a wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the other, pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones.
They are to be found on the two banks of the Loire, on the confines of the departments of Allier and Saone-et-Loire, where they are still tolerably numerous, especially in the latter department. They are designated in the country as Les Blancs, because that in their ceremonies they cover their heads with a white hood, and their priests are vested like the Druids in a long robe of the same colour.
It bears a very slimy white berry, of which birdlime may be made, whence its Latin name of viscus, It is one of those plants which do not grow in the ground by a root of their own, but fix themselves upon other plants; whence they have been humorously styled parasitical, as being hangers-on or dependants. It was the mistletoe of the oak that the Druids particularly honored.
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