Under pillow and insults I bounced to my feet, filled for a moment with quite real wrath; he lay back, roaring with laughter, and my anger was swept away. "Doc," he said, very seriously, after this, "I know who the Three are!" "Yes?" I queried, with studied sarcasm. "Yes?" he mimicked. "Yes! Ye--ye" He paused under the menace of my look, grinned. "Yes, I know," he continued. "They're of the Tuatha De, the old ones, the great people of Ireland, _that's_ who they are!" I knew, of course, of the Tuatha De Danann, the tribes of the god Danu, the half-legendary, half-historical clan who found their home in Erin some four thousand years before the Christian era, and who have left so deep an impress upon the Celtic mind and its myths. "Yes," said Larry again, "the Tuatha De--the Ancient Ones who had spells that could compel Mananan, who is the spirit of all the seas, an' Keithor, who is the god of all green living things, an' even Hesus, the unseen god, whose pulse is the pulse of all the firmament; yes, an' Orchil too, who sits within the earth an' weaves with the shuttle of mystery and her three looms of birth an' life an' death--even Orchil would weave as they commanded!" He was silent--then: "They are of them--the mighty ones--why else would I have bent my knee to them as I would have to the spirit of my dead mother? Why else would Lakla, whose gold-brown hair is the hair of Eilidh the Fair, whose mouth is the sweet mouth of Deirdre, an' whose soul walked with mine ages agone among the fragrant green myrtle of Erin, serve them?" he whispered, eyes full of dream. "Have you any idea how they got here?" I asked, not unreasonably. "I haven't thought about that," he replied somewhat testily. "But at once, me excellent man o' wisdom, a number occur to me. One of them is that this little party of three might have stopped here on their way to Ireland, an' for good reasons of their own decided to stay a while; an' another is that they might have come here afterward, havin' got wind of what those rats out there were contemplatin', and have stayed on the job till the time was ripe to save Ireland from 'em; the rest of the world, too, of course," he added magnanimously, "but Ireland in particular. And do any of those reasons appeal to ye?" I shook my head. "Well, what do you think?" he asked wearily.