"But, Manuel, what need is there for you to model it at all?"

"Because my mother, sir, was always very anxious for me to make a figure
in the world, and when she lay a-dying I promised her that I would do
so, and then she put a geas upon me to do it."

"Ah, to be sure! but are you certain it was this kind of figure she
meant?"

"Yes, for I have often heard her say that, when I grew up, she wanted me
to make myself a splendid and admirable young man in every respect. So
it is necessary that I make the figure of a young man, for my mother was
not of these parts, but a woman of Ath Cliath, and so she put a geas
upon me--"

"Yes, yes, you had mentioned this geas, and I am wondering what sort of
a something is this geas."

"It is what you might call a bond or an obligation, sir, only it is of
the particularly strong and unreasonable and affirmative and secret sort
which the Virbolg use."

The stranger now looked from the figure to Manuel, and the stranger
deliberated the question (which later was to puzzle so many people) if
any human being could be as simple as Manuel appeared. Manuel at twenty
was not yet the burly giant he became. But already he was a gigantic and
florid person, so tall that the heads of few men reached to his
shoulder; a person of handsome exterior, high featured and blond, having
a narrow small head, and vivid light blue eyes, and the chest of a
stallion; a person whose left eyebrow had an odd oblique droop, so that