_MIRCATH._ _THE LAUGHTER OF SCATHACH THE QUEEN._ [14] The word "Seanachas" means either traditionary lore, or "telling of tales of the olden time"--and it is in this sense that it is used here. THE SONG OF THE SWORD These are of the Seanachas told me by Ian Cameron ("Ian Mòr"), before the flaming peats, at a hill-shealing, in a season when the premature snows found the bracken still golden and the ptarmigan with their autumn browns no more than flecked and mottled with gray. He has himself now a quieter sleep than the sound of that falling snow, and it is three years since his face became as white and as cold. He had pleasure in telling _sgeul_ after _sgeul_ of the ancient days. Far more readily at all times would he repeat stories of this dim past he loved so well than the more intimate tales which had his own pulse beating in them, as "The Daughter of the Sun" and others that I have given elsewhere. Often he would look up from where he held his face in his hands as he brooded into the dull steadfast flame that consumed the core of the peats; and without preamble, and with words in no apparent way linked to those last spoken, would narrate some brief episode, and always as one who had witnessed the event. Sometimes, indeed, these brief tales were like waves: one saw them rise, congregate, and expand in a dark billow--and the next moment there was a vanishing puff of spray and the billow had lapsed. I cannot recall many of these fugitive tales--seanachas, as he spoke of them collectively, for each _sgeul_ was of the past, and had its roots in legendary lore--but of those that remained with me, here are four. All came upon me as birds flying in the dark: I knew not whence they came or upon what wind they had steered their mysterious course. They were there, that was all. Ancient things come again in Ian's brain: or recovered out of the dim days, and seen anew through the wonder-lens of his imagination. * * * * * It was in a white June, as they call it, in the third year after the pirates of Lochlin had fed the corbies of the Hebrid Isles, that the summer-sailors once more came down the Minch of Skye. An east wind blew fresh from the mountains, though between dawn and sunrise it veered till it chilled itself upon the granite peaks of the Cuchullins, and then leaped north-westward with the white foam of its feet caught from behind by the sun-glint. The vikings on board the _Svart-Alf_ laughed at that. The spray flew from the curved black prow of the great galley, and the wake danced in the dazzle--the sea-cream that they loved to see.