Another story tells of Cuchulain's mysterious parentage. His mother was a sister of King Conor; consequently he was the king's nephew. Another again relates the wooing of Cuchulain, and how he won Emer for his wife. Another is called Cuchulain's "Up-bringing," or teaching, part of which, however, is found in the piece called the "Wooing of Emer." This saga relates how he, with two other of the Ultonians, went abroad to Alba to perfect their warlike accomplishments, and how they placed themselves under the tuition of different female-warriors,[5] who taught them various and extraordinary feats of arms. He traverses the plain of Misfortune by the aid of a wheel and of an apple given him by an unknown friend, and reaches the great female instructress Scathach, whose daughter falls in love with him. An admirable example occurs to me here, of showing in the concrete that which I have elsewhere laid stress upon, namely, the great elaboration which in many instances we find in the modern versions of sagas, compared with the antique vellum texts. It does not at all follow that because a story is written down with brevity in ancient Irish, it was also told with brevity. The oldest form of the saga of Cuchulain's "Wooing of Emer" contains traces of a pre-Danish or seventh-century text, but the condensed and shortened relation of the saga found in the oldest manuscript of it, is almost certainly not the form in which the bards and ollavs related it. On the contrary, I believe that the stories now epitomised in ancient vellum texts were even then told, though not written down, at full length, and with many flourishes by the bards and professed story-tellers, and that the skeletons merely, or as Keating calls it, the "bones of the history,"[6] were in most instances all that was committed to the rare and expensive parchments. It is more than likely that the longer modern paper redactions, though some of the ancient pagan traits, especially those most incomprehensible to the moderns, may be missing, yet represent more nearly the _manner_ of the original bardic telling, than the abridgments of twelfth or thirteenth-century vellums. In this case the ancient recension,[7] founded on a pre-Danish text, merely mentions that Scathach's house, at which Cuchulain arrives, after leaving the plain of Misfortune, "was built upon a rock of appalling height. Cuchulain followed the road pointed out to him. He reached the castle of Scathach. He knocked at the door with the handle of his spear and entered. Uathach, the daughter of Scathach, meets him. She looked at him, but she spoke not, so much did the hero's beauty make her love him. She went to her mother and told her of the beauty of the man who had newly come. 'That man has pleased you,' said her mother. 'He shall come to my couch,' answered the girl, 'and I shall sleep at his side this night.' 'Thy intention displeases me not,' said her mother."