"Happy is the house in which she is Between men and children and women, Between druids and musical performers, Between cupbearers and doorkeepers.[14] Between equerries without fear, And distributors who divide [the fare], And, over all these, the command belongs To Credé of the yellow hair. * * * * * The colour [of her house] is like the colour of lime, Within it are couches and green rushes (?) Within it are silks and blue mantles, Within it are red, gold, and crystal cups. Of its many chambers the corner stones, Are all of silver and yellow gold, In faultless stripes its thatch is spread, Of wings of brown, and of crimson red. Two door posts of green I see, Door not devoid of beauty, Of carved silver, long has it been renowned, In the lintel that is over the door. Credé's chair is on your left hand, The pleasantest of the pleasant it is, All over, a blaze[15] of Alpine gold At the foot of her beautiful couch. A splendid couch in full array Stands directly above the chair; It was made by _Tuile_ in the East, Of yellow gold and precious stones. There is another bed on your right hand Of gold and silver without defect, With curtains with soft [pillows], With graceful rods of golden-bronze. An hundred feet spans Credé's house From one angle to the other, And twenty feet are fully measured In the breadth of its noble door. Its portico is covered, too, With wings of birds, both yellow and blue, Its lawn in front and its well Of crystal and of Carmogel." The houses of the ancient Irish were either like Cormac's banqueting-hall and Credé's house, built quadrilaterally of felled trees or split planks planted upright in the earth, and thatched overhead, or else, as was most usually the case, they were cylindrical and made of wickerwork, with a cup-shaped roof, plastered with clay and whitewashed. The magnificent dimensions of Cormac's palace, verified as they are by the careful measurements of the Ordnance Survey--a palace certainly erected in pagan times, since Tara was deserted for ever about the year 550--bear evidence, like our wealth of beautifully-wrought gold ornaments, and the superior workmanship of our surviving articles of bronze and clay, to a high degree of civilisation and culture amongst the pre-Christian Irish; I have here adduced them as bearing indirect evidence in favour of the probability that a people so civilised would have been likely to have seized on the invention of writing when they first came in contact with it, and would have kept their annals and genealogies all the more accurately from the very fact that they were evidently so advanced in other matters.