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For my tutor Fergus paid a good heed to my education in the whole art of war and especially as to swimming. He is himself a most noble swimmer and I have profited by his instructions. Once he put me to the test. It was in the great swimming bath in the Callan, dug out, it is said, by the Firbolgs in the ancient days, and the trial was in secret and its issue has not been revealed to this day.
The De Danaans must ere this have spread through all of the island, except the western province assigned to the Firbolgs; for we find them opposing, but vainly opposing, the Sons of Milid, at the very place of their landing.
The son of Erc was buried on the strand, where the waves lap along the shore, and his cairn of Traig Eotaile still stands by the water-side, last resting-place of the last ruler of the Firbolgs. Meanwhile the fighting had gone on at Mag Tuiread by the lakes, till but three hundred of the Firbolgs were left, with Sreng, the fierce fighter, at their head.
At length the Formorians prevailed, and the children of the second immigration were either slain or driven into exile, from which some of their posterity returned long afterwards, and again disputed the country, under two different denominations. The Firbolgs or Belgae are the third immigration.
We are the more justified in seeing, in these dark cromlech-builders, the Fomorians of old Gaelic tradition, who came up out of the sea and subjugated the Firbolgs.
At length the Formorians prevailed, and the children of the second immigration were either slain or driven into exile, from which some of their posterity returned long afterwards, and again disputed the country, under two different denominations. The Firbolgs or Belgae are the third immigration.
Even to those familiar with the geological record of man it is sufficiently startling to find that the Firbolgs, the early dwarfish race of Hyperboreans, in all probability were ignorant of boats; that they almost certainly came to our island dry-shod, as they had come earlier to Britain, migrating over unbroken spaces of land to what afterwards became the isle of Erin; for this race we find everywhere associated with the mammoth on the continent, in Britain, in our own island and the mammoths certainly never came over in ships.
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