In moods such as these one can hear in the far distance the wailing of a dirge, a knell, indefinitely yet distinctly, and the foreboding it brings is of an end to something which should have no end; a falling away, a premature decay which is like a growing cloud soon to cover the whole mind.... Shelmerdene, do you know the story of the Dán-nan-Rón, which Fiona Macleod tells? How there lived three brothers on the isle of Eilanmore: Marcus, who was "the Eilanmore," and Gloom, whose voice "was low and clear, but cold as pale green water running under ice," and Sheumais, on whose brow lay "the dusk of the shadow." Gloom was the wisest of the brothers, and played upon an oaten flute, which is called a _feadan_; and men were afraid of the cold, white notes of his barbaric runes, as he played his _feadan_ from rock to rock and on the seashore, but most of all they feared the playing of the Dán-nan-Rón, which is the Song of the Seal and calls men to their death in the sea. And when the eldest brother Marcus was killed with the throwing of a knife, the murderer heard the woods of Gloom, which said that he would hear the Dán-nan-Rón the night before he died, and lest he should doubt those words, he would hear it again in the very hour of his death. It happened as Gloom said: for one night the playing of the _feadan_ drove the slayer, Manus MacCodrum, down into the sea, and as he battled madly in the water, and the blood gushed out of his body as the teeth of seals tore the life out of him, he heard from far away the cold, white notes of the Dán-nan-Rón.