could ask him. He would have known a thousand tricks, and because
our instinct is to teach, and because no man can keep a trick
from a boy, he would show them to Fionn.

There was the marsh too; a whole new life to be learned; a
complicated, mysterious, dank, slippery, reedy, treacherous life,
but with its own beauty and an allurement that could grow on one,
so that you could forget the solid world and love only that which
quaked and gurgled.

In this place you may swim. By this sign and this you will know
if it is safe to do so, said Fiacuil mac Cona; but in this place,
with this sign on it and that, you must not venture a toe.

But where Fionn would venture his toes his ears would follow.

There are coiling weeds down there, the robber counselled him;
there are thin, tough, snaky binders that will trip you and grip
you, that will pull you and will not let you go again until you
are drowned; until you are swaying and swinging away below, with
outstretched arms, with outstretched legs, with a face all stares
and smiles and jockeyings, gripped in those leathery arms, until
there is no more to be gripped of you even by them.

"Watch these and this and that," Fionn would have been told, "and
always swim with a knife in your teeth."

He lived there until his guardians found out where he was and
came after him. Fiacuil gave him up to them, and he was brought
home again to the woods of Slieve Bloom, but he had gathered