English Literature for Boys and Girls by H. E. (Henrietta Elizabeth) Marshall
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page 14 of 806 (01%)
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The whole land echoed with their bellowing. The earth shook
beneath their feet and the sky grew dark with flying sods of earth and with flecks of foam. After long fighting Brown Bull conquered, and goring White-horned to death, ran off with him impaled upon his horns, shaking his shattered body to pieces as he ran. But Brown Bull, too, was wounded to death. Mad with pain and wounds, he turned to his own land, and there "He lay down Against the hill, and his great heart broke there, And sent a stream of blood down all the slope; And thus, when all the war and Tain had ended, In his own land, 'midst his own hills, he died."* *The Tain, by Mary A. Hutton. The Cattle Raid of Cooley is a strange wild tale, yet from it we can learn a great deal about the life of these old, far-away times. We can learn from it something of what the people did and thought, and how they lived, and even of what they wore. Here is a description of a driver and his war chariot, translated, of course, into English prose. "It is then that the charioteer arose, and he put on his hero's dress of charioteering. This was the hero's dress of charioteering that he put on: his soft tunic of deer skin, so that it did not restrain the movement of his hands outside. He put on his black upper cloak over it outside. . . . The charioteer took first then his helm, ridged like a board, four-cornered. . . . This was well measured to him, and it |
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