CHAPTER XXVI.
The Wooing of Lakla I had slept soundly and dreamlessly; I wakened quietly in the great chamber into which Rador had ushered O'Keefe and myself after that culminating experience of crowded, nerve-racking hours--the facing of the Three.
Now, lying gazing upward at the high-vaulted ceiling, I heard Larry's voice: "They look like birds." Evidently he was thinking of the Three; a silence--then: "Yes, they look like _birds_--and they look, and it's meaning no disrespect to them I am at all, they look like _lizards_"-- and another silence--"they look like some sort of gods, and, by the good sword-arm of Brian Boru, they look human, too! And it's _none_ of them they are either, so what--what the--what the sainted St.
Bridget are they ?" Another short silence, and then in a tone of awed and absolute conviction: "That's it, sure! That's what they are--it all hangs in--they couldn't be anything else--" He gave a whoop; a pillow shot over and caught me across the head.
"Wake up!" shouted Larry.

"Wake up, ye seething caldron of fossilized superstitions! Wake up, ye bogy-haunted man of scientific unwisdom!" Under pillow and insults I bounced to my feet, filled for a moment with quite real wrath; he lay back, roaring with laughter, and my anger was swept away.
"Doc," he said, very seriously, after this, "I know who the Three are!" "Yes ?" I queried, with studied sarcasm.
"Yes ?" he mimicked.

"Yes! Ye--ye" He paused under the menace of my look, grinned.

"Yes, I know," he continued.

"They're of the Tuatha De, the old ones, the great people of Ireland, _that's_ who they are!" I knew, of course, of the Tuatha De Danann, the tribes of the god Danu, the half-legendary, half-historical clan who found their home in Erin some four thousand years before the Christian era, and who have left so deep an impress upon the Celtic mind and its myths.
"Yes," said Larry again, "the Tuatha De--the Ancient Ones who had spells that could compel Mananan, who is the spirit of all the seas, an' Keithor, who is the god of all green living things, an' even Hesus, the unseen god, whose pulse is the pulse of all the firmament; yes, an' Orchil too, who sits within the earth an' weaves with the shuttle of mystery and her three looms of birth an' life an' death--even Orchil would weave as they commanded!" He was silent--then: "They are of them--the mighty ones--why else would I have bent my knee to them as I would have to the spirit of my dead mother?
Why else would Lakla, whose gold-brown hair is the hair of Eilidh the Fair, whose mouth is the sweet mouth of Deirdre, an' whose soul walked with mine ages agone among the fragrant green myrtle of Erin, serve them ?" he whispered, eyes full of dream.
"Have you any idea how they got here ?" I asked, not unreasonably.
"I haven't thought about that," he replied somewhat testily.