familiar to him. And he could at last have told which brother of
the great brotherhood was making the noise he heard at any
moment. The wind too: he would have listened to its thousand
voices as it moved in all seasons and in all moods. Perhaps a
horse would stray into the thick screen about his home, and would
look as solemnly on Fionn as Fionn did on it. Or, coming suddenly
on him, the horse might stare, all a-cock with eyes and ears and
nose, one long-drawn facial extension, ere he turned and bounded
away with manes all over him and hoofs all under him and tails
all round him. A solemn-nosed, stern-eyed cow would amble and
stamp in his wood to find a flyless shadow; or a strayed sheep
would poke its gentle muzzle through leaves.

"A boy," he might think, as be stared on a staring horse, "a boy
cannot wag his tail to keep the flies off," and that lack may
have saddened him. He may have thought that a cow can snort and
be dignified at the one moment, and that timidity is comely in a
sheep. He would have scolded the jackdaw, and tried to
out-whistle the throstle, and wondered why his pipe got tired
when the blackbird's didn't . There would be flies to be watched,
slender atoms in yellow gauze that flew, and filmy specks that
flittered, and sturdy, thick-ribbed brutes that pounced like cats
and bit like dogs and flew like lightning. He may have mourned
for the spider in bad luck who caught that fly. There would be
much to see and remember and compare, and there would be, always,
his two guardians. The flies change from second to second; one
cannot tell if this bird is a visitor or an inhabitant, and a
sheep is just sister to a sheep; but the women were as rooted as
the house itself.