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Thus Charlemagne slept in the Untersberg, and will sleep until the ravens of Miramon Lluagor have left his mountains. Thus Rhyming Thomas in the Eildon Hills, thus Ogier in Avalon, thus Oisin " The old lady bade fair to go on interminably in her gentle resolute piping old voice, but the other interrupted.
It was the memory of that darkness, you remember, that brought him back, years after, to convert Milcho. Patrick, three hundred years after the other 'Fianna' had vanished from the earth, the three centuries being passed in Tir-nan-og, the Land of Youth, where the great Oisin married the king's daughter, Niam of the Golden Hair.
Inside he heard a sound of singing. He rode to the door and looked in. There were people kneeling before a man who stood in a higher place than the rest and held up a golden cup. "This was something that Oisin did not understand, and he rode away, remembering what the Princess had told him, that he would find Ireland changed. He wondered if he had been wise to come at all.
I have been something of a literary man myself was at one time and I delight in seeing a book in some of its early stages. Besides, I have been a wanderer and even a fighter myself, and perhaps I might be able to make a suggestion or two. 'I shall be only too delighted. Now, Oisin, my love, you must not object.
And I will tell you another story about it, not to make you understand, but to show you how it is. "Long ago Finn McCool was the great champion of Ireland. He had many warriors, who were called Fenians. He had a son, Oisin, who was a great warrior, too, and besides that a poet and a minstrel. Some of his poems are left to us yet.
There was some association in his mind with the name of Sarrasin, but he could not reduce it to precise knowledge. 'Yes, my brother, said the white gentleman. 'My brother, Oisin Stewart Sarrasin, whose name, I am proud to think, is familiar in many parts of the world. The recollection he was seeking came to the Dictator.
'It matters not, Dermat, she said, 'whether Oisin win or lose the game, but if thou speakest so that they hear, it may cost thee thy life. Yet did Dermat pay no heed to the counsel of Grania, but plucked a berry, and with it took aim so true that he hit the chessman that Oisin should move. And Oisin moved the man and won the game.
Connla of the Golden Hair was lured away by a fairy maiden, and taken, in a 'gleaming, straight-gliding, strong, crystal canoe, to her domain in the hills; and Oisin, you remember, was transported to the Land of the Ever Youthful by the beautiful Niam.
The peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duelists that were, and the whole hurly-burly of legends Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind that finds them so interesting all are a portion of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel revealed.
A variant adds some particulars, from which it appears that Oisin was not only husband of the queen, but also rightful monarch of Tir na n'Og. For in that land was a strange custom. The office of king was the prize of a race every seven years.
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