Success crowned their extraordinary adventures, much to the chagrin of Lugh, who sent a spell of magic after them to bring them back. They present him with their spoils, taken in strange and distant lands, only to be reminded that the full measure of the _eric_ has yet to be discharged. On the morrow they went to their ship, and the maiden, with moist eyes, sees them off once more. Again they are successful. Thereafter, in attempting the last feat of all, namely, to give three shouts on the hill of Midkena in Lochlann, they got severely wounded by the spears of its champion guardians. And on their return they despatched their aged father, Tuireann, to Tara with all haste to seek from Lamhfhada the gifted skin to relieve them, but Lugh refused; and the life went forth from the brothers three at the same time. Their father sang their death song, and “after that lay, Tuireann fell upon his children and his soul left him;” and they were interred, parent and sons, and, it is even alleged, sister too, all in one grave. The “Tragedy of the Children of Lir” is the second in order of the Three Sorrows. Though set in the earliest cycle, it is not represented in any of the ancient MSS. The oldest as yet known to contain it is No. XXXVIII. of the Scottish collection, written at the latest in the early seventeenth century. There is a copy also in MS. LVI. All the other copies, which are pretty numerous, belong to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and are in the MSS. of Dublin and the British Museum. Monsieur H. d’Arbois de Jubainville in his survey noted no less than seventeen of these. The comparative lateness of the records has led Mr. Alfred Nutt to surmise that this story may simply be the Gaelic version of the “Seven Swans” _märchen_, once common in the country, and worked up by a monk of the sixteenth century—a suggestion Professor Mackinnon thinks not at all unlikely. O’Curry published the tale with a translation in the _Atlantis_, and Dr. P. W. Joyce included it in his _Old Celtic Romances_.