that a fish cannot hop, but he gets there in a flash, and he
isn't there in another. Up or down, sideways or endways, it is
all one to a fish. He goes and is gone. He twists this way and
disappears the other way. He is over you when he ought to be
under you, and he is biting your toe when you thought you were
biting his tail.

You cannot catch a fish by swimming, but you can try, and Fionn
tried. He got a grudging commendation from the terrible women
when he was able to slip noiselessly in the tide, swim under
water to where a wild duck was floating and grip it by the leg.

"Qu--," said the duck, and he disappeared before he had time to
get the "-ack" out of him.

So the time went, and Fionn grew long and straight and tough like
a sapling; limber as a willow, and with the flirt and spring of a
young bird. One of the ladies may have said, "He is shaping very
well, my dear," and the other replied, as is the morose privilege
of an aunt, "He will never be as good as his father," but their
hearts must have overflowed in the night, in the silence, in the
darkness, when they thought of the living swiftness they had
fashioned, and that dear fair head.



CHAPTER V

ONE day his guardians were agitated: they held confabulations at
which Fionn was not permitted to assist. A man who passed by in