His foes are baffled. Impatient Meve cannot forget that the Ulster men will soon be rid of their childish feebleness, and then the game is up. So she approaches Ferdia, the only warrior fit to match Cuchulinn, with the view of arranging a combat whereby the latter may be laid low. Ferdia at first refuses to fight his former comrade, with whom he had made a compact of undying friendship while attending the lady Scathach’s school in Skye. The Queen then promises him Finnamhair for wife, with land and riches. It is probable that even this bait would not have fetched the unwilling warrior had she not further threatened that her druids and ollamhs would “criticise, satirise, and blemish him,” enough to “raise three blisters on his face,” if he refused. Thereafter he consented, thinking it better to fall by valour and championship than by druids and reproach. Fergus was accordingly sent forward to tell Cuchulinn that his friend Ferdia was coming to fight him. “I am here,” retorted the champion, “detaining and delaying the four great provinces of Erin from Samhain till Feill Brighde, and I have not yielded one foot in retreat before any one during that time, nor will I, I trust, before him.” The charioteer gets ready the chariot, and into it sprang “the battle-fighting, dexterous, battle-winning, red-sworded hero, Cuchulinn, son of Sualtam, and there shouted around him Bocanachs and Bananachs and Genîtî Glindi, and demons of the air. For the Tuatha de Danann were used to set up shouts around him, so that the hatred and the fear and the abhorrence and the great terror of him should be greater in every battle, in every battlefield, in every combat, and in every fight into which he went.” The heroes met at the ford. After the first day’s fight, “each of them approached the other forthwith and each put his hand round the other’s neck and gave him three kisses. Their horses were in the same paddock that night, and their charioteers at the same fire; and their charioteers spread beds of green rushes for them with wounded men’s pillows to them. The professors of healing and curing came to heal and cure them, and they applied herbs and plants to the stabs and cuts and gashes and to all their wounds. Of every herb and of every healing and curing plant that was put to the stabs and cuts and gashes and to all the wounds of Cuchulinn, he would send an equal portion from him westward over the ford to Ferdia, so that the men of Erin might not be able to say, should Ferdia fall by him, that it was by better means of cure that he was enabled to kill him.” As the days pass the fighting becomes more serious. Early on the fourth Ferdia arose and went forward alone to the ford. He knew that that day would decide the contest, and that either or both of them would fall. Having put on his wonderful suit of battle, he displayed many extraordinary feats which he never learned from any other,—not from Scathach, or Uathach, or Aoife, but which were invented by himself.