Bloom and was nursed there in secret.

It is likely the women were fond of him, for other than Fionn
there was no life about them. He would be their life; and their
eyes may have seemed as twin benedictions resting on the small
fair head. He was fair-haired, and it was for his fairness that
he was afterwards called Fionn; but at this period he was known
as Deimne. They saw the food they put into his little frame
reproduce itself length-ways and sideways in tough inches, and in
springs and energies that crawled at first, and then toddled, and
then ran. He had birds for playmates, but all the creatures that
live in a wood must have been his comrades. There would have been
for little Fionn long hours of lonely sunshine, when the world
seemed just sunshine and a sky. There would have been hours as
long, when existence passed like a shade among shadows, in the
multitudinous tappings of rain that dripped from leaf to leaf in
the wood, and slipped so to the ground. He would have known
little snaky paths, narrow enough to be filled by his own small
feet, or a goat's; and he would have wondered where they went,
and have marvelled again to find that, wherever they went, they
came at last, through loops and twists of the branchy wood, to
his own door. He may have thought of his own door as the
beginning and end of the world, whence all things went, and
whither all things came.

Perhaps he did not see the lark for a long time, but he would
have heard him, far out of sight in the endless sky, thrilling
and thrilling until the world seemed to have no other sound but
that clear sweetness; and what a world it was to make that sound!
Whistles and chirps, coos and caws and croaks, would have grown