Legendary fictions of the Irish Celts

Ossianic and other Early Legends. 241
strength would be no more than that of a newly-bora
child.
Alas ! Fion and his heroes were scarcely remembered
on the plains and by the streams of Erinn. The fortress
of Almuin was a mound and moat overgrown with
docks and thistles, and moss had covered the huge castmg-stones
of the Fianna. Where strong mounds and
ditches once secured armed warriors from their foes, he
found unchecked entrance, and prayers and hymns recited
and sung in stone buildings surmounted by cross and
spire. He saw fewer spears and many more sickles than
in the days of Fion, and near the Pass of Wattles
(Dublin) he found Patrick the missionary raising a lowly
house of worship. As he sorrowfully rode up the Glen
of Thrushes ( G/ann-a-SmoIl), a crowd of men striving to
raise a huge stone on a low waggon, craved his aid.
Stooping, he heaved the mass on to the car, but in doing
so the girth snapped, the saddle turned round, away flew
the white steed, and the last of the heroes lay on the
hill-side, a grizzly-haired, feeble man.
He was conveyed to Bal a' Cliath, and St. Patrick
gave him a kind reception, and kept him in his house.
Many an attempt did he make to convert him to Christianity,
but with little success ; and the conferences
generally ended with Oisin's laments for the lost heroes.
The saint, pitying the desolation of the brave old man,
would then introduce some remark on past events, which
would be sure to draw from the bard a rhymed narrative
of a Fenian battle, or hunting, or invasion by the king
of the world—at least of Greece—or an enchantment
worked on Fion or Fergus by some Danaan Druid, such
as the ones just told. The winding up would be a fresh
lament over his own desolate state, and the faded glories
of the once renowned Fianna.
Poor Oisin did not find the frugal larder of the saint at
all to his mind—he that had been used to the profuse
feasts of former hunting days, when they cut up the
deer, and baked it between the heated stones in the large
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