people at home, and to be wondered at and exclaimed at as they
exhibited bits of the knowledge which they had brought from the
great schools. They would know tags of rhyme and tricks about
learning which Fionn would hear of; and now and again, as they
rested in a glade or by the brink of a river, they might try
their lessons over. They might even refer to the ogham wands on
which the first words of their tasks and the opening lines of
poems were cut; and it is likely that, being new to these things,
they would talk of them to a youngster, and, thinking that his
wits could be no better than their own, they might have explained
to him how ogham was written. But it is far more likely that his
women guardians had already started him at those lessons.

Still this band of young bards would have been of infinite
interest to Fionn, not on account of what they had learned, but
because of what they knew. All the things that he should have
known as by nature: the look, the movement, the feeling of
crowds; the shouldering and intercourse of man with man; the
clustering of houses and how people bore themselves in and about
them; the movement of armed men, and the homecoming look of
wounds; tales of births, and marriages and deaths; the chase with
its multitudes of men and dogs; all the noise, the dust, the
excitement of mere living. These, to Fionn, new come from leaves
and shadows and the dipple and dapple of a wood, would have
seemed wonderful; and the tales they would have told of their
masters, their looks, fads, severities, sillinesses, would have
been wonderful also.

That band should have chattered like a rookery.