are the stones which still cumber the ground, or those subtler traces of
occupation of which philology keeps the key, and pushing aside a long
and uncounted crowd of kings, with names as uncertain as their deeds,
pushing aside, too, the legends and coming to hard fact, we must picture
Ireland still covered for the most part with pathless forests, but here
and there cleared and settled after a rude fashion by rough
cattle-owning tribes, who herded their own cattle and "lifted" their
neighbour's quite in the approved fashion of the Scotch Highlanders up
to a century and a half ago.

Upon the whole, we may fairly conclude that matters were ameliorating
more or less; that the wolves were being killed, the woods cleared--not
as yet in the ferocious wholesale fashion of later days--that a little
rudimentary agriculture showed perhaps here and there in sheltered
places. Sheep and goats grazed then as now over the hills, and herds of
cattle began to cover the Lowlands. The men, too, were possibly
beginning to grow a trifle less like two-legged beasts of prey, though
still rough as the very wolves they hunted; bare-legged, wild-eyed
hunter-herdsmen with--who can doubt it?--flocks of children trooping
vociferously at their heels.

Of the daily life, habits, dress, religion of these people--the direct
ancestors of four-fifths of the present inhabitants of Ireland--we know
unfortunately exceedingly little. It is not even certain, whether human
sacrifices did or did not form--as they certainly did in Celtic
Britain--part of that religion, though there is some evidence that it
did, in which case prisoners taken in battle, or slaves, were probably
the victims.

That a considerable amount of slavery existed in early Celtic Ireland is