exactly where lay the chest beneath the waves, for it mattered not how
fierce blew the gale, above the gold the surface of the water was ever
unbroken. At last there came one who heard the tradition, and set about
the task of recovering the sunken chest. The twin horses, twin oxen, and
twin lads he procured readily enough, but to find a smith of kind was
not so easy--"a smith of kind" being a blacksmith whose ancestors for
six generations have been smiths, he himself being the seventh
generation. But this, too, at length was found, and the smith forged the
necessary length of chain. Then, taking advantage of a favourable day,
when breeze sufficient blew to reveal the tell-tale spot of calm water,
the treasure-hunter started in his boat, leaving one end of the chain on
shore and paying out fathom after fathom as his boat swept round the
calm and again reached shore. Now hitching the yauds to one end and the
oxen to the other, the animals were cautiously started by the twin
drivers. Slowly the chain swept over the bed of the lough, and
tightened, fast in something heavy that gave and came shoreward in the
bight of the chain. Cannily the drivers drove, and ever came the weight
nearer to dry land. Already the treasure-seeker in his boat, peering
eagerly down into the quiet water, fancied that he was a made man; he
could almost _see_ that box. But a few more yards and it was his. Alas!
In his eagerness to secure "a smith of kind" he had made insufficient
inquiries into that smith's ancestry. There was (as he discovered when
too late) a flaw in his pedigree! Some ancestress, it was said, could
not show her marriage lines, or something else was wrong. At any rate,
there was a flaw, and that was sufficient to upset the whole thing, for
the chain, not being made by a smith of kind, was of course not of the
true temper. Hence, just when success was about to crown their efforts,
the horses made a violent plunge forward--and the chain parted at a
weak link! No further attempts to ascertain the exact bearings of that
box have ever been successful. It is, as of old, at the bottom of the