white steed, else he should never return to the Land of Youth, but be an old man, withered and blind. Ossian departed,* but found no tidings of Fionn in Erin. As Niamh had predicted, conditions were not as they had been. After a while, however, a group of men approached, and their leader implored him to remove a large flag of marble under which a host of their fellows lay oppressed in dire extremity. The bard speaks:

I lay upon my right breast,

And I took the flag in my hand;

With the strength and activity of my limbs.

I sent it seven perches from its place!

With the force of the very large flag,

The golden girth broke on the white steed;

I came down full suddenly,

On the soles of my two feet on the lea.

No sooner did I come down,

Than the white steed took fright;

He went then on his way,

And I, in sorrow, both weak and feeble.

I lost the sight of my eyes,

My form, my countenance, and my vigour;

I was an old man, poor and blind,
Without strength, understanding, or esteem.

Patrick! there is to thee my story,

As it occurred to myself without a lie,
My going and my adventures in certain,
And my returning from the "Land of Youth."

The injunction put upon Ossian not to dismount from his steed in the land of mortals is duplicated in the ancient tale of Loegaire mac Crimthain, who, after a year's residence in the faery realm of Mag Mell, the Plains of Pleasure, was filled with a desire to seek tidings in his old home of Connaught, but who, mindful of a warning by the ruler of the sidh, resisted the urging of his kinsmen to alight on earth, declared that he came merely to bid them farewell, and returned unscathed to the otherworld, whence he has not since issued.*

On the other hand, an object lesson in the result of disobedience to faery command was afforded Bran son of Febal, in the oldest extant tale of the sort (written down perhaps as early as the seventh century),† though the hero himself escaped. Bran, we read, was led mysteriously on a voyage, with certain comrades, to the Isle of Joy and the Land of Women, but even among the delights of Elysium homesickness seized one of the company, Nechtan son of Colbran. "His kindred kept praying Bran that he should go to Ireland with him. The woman said to them their going would make them rue. However, they went, and the woman said that none of them should touch the land. Then they went until they arrived at a gathering at Srub Brain. The men asked of them who it was came over the sea. Said Bran: 'I am Bran the son of

Febal,' saith he. However, the other saith: 'We do not know such a one, though the Voyage of Bran is in our ancient stories.' The man [Nechtan] leaps from them out of the coracle. As soon as he touched the earth of Ireland, forthwith he was a heap of ashes, as though he had been in the earth for many hundred years."

In the Breton lay of Guingamor,* possibly by Marie de France, we have the same falling from the horse of the mortal returned from faery and his accompanying decrepitude, when he has broken the command of his otherworld mistress; but here the command is not that he refrain from alighting, but that he refrain from eating food in his native land.† Guingamor, in pursuit of a mysterious white stag, is led to a faery castle where were

Sons de herpes et de vieles

Chanz de vallez et de puceles.

With the mistress of the place he dwells in delight three hundred years, though these seem to him but three days. When finally he returns home to tell his kinsmen of his adventure, he learns that they are all dead, but that the story of his strange departure is still held in memory by their descendants. To a charcoal-burner he recounts his otherworld experience, and then prepares to return. Growing very hungry, however, he eats some

apples from a tree by the roadside, whereupon he immediately becomes old and feeble.*

A Celtic tale, similar in many respects to that of Bran, is told by Walter Map (†1209) in his De Nugis Curialium,† of an ancient British king, by name Herla, who is conducted by a dwarf through a stone to a mysterious, brilliant underworld, whence he is permitted to return with his men after what seems to them only three days, but with the strict injunction that none shall dismount from horseback until a little dog the dwarf gives them shall leap down from the arms of his holder. Herla rides but a short while before he sees an old shepherd of whom he asks news of the queen. He is informed that stories of Herla's disappearance remain in the tales of the Britons, but that Saxons have ruled in the land for two hundred years. Though nearly overcome by amazement, King Herla keeps to his horse. Some of his followers, however, alight, and when they touch the earth they crumble to dust a fate that reminds us of what happened to the Two Fiddlers who lived for a hundred years with Thomas Rhymer.

According to Map's story, Herla and his band ride on and on for ages, but at last disappear in the River Wye, in the year that Henry II was crowned. Whether or no it was Map who first connected this tale with the famous "Mesnie Helle

kin," we cannot say; * but this we know, that Hellekin, who afterwards became the stage-figure Harlequin, was represented in the Middle Ages as a follower of Morgain la Fée,† and the idea of a faery cavalcade was then widespread. Even Arthur was made the leader of the Wild Chase.

In the Scottish romance of Eger and Grime,‡ which was written about the same time as the Wallace, the "forbidden country to which the heroes go, like Chrétien's Yvain, is evidently faery. There the lady mistress of the place § heals Eger's grievous wounds by magic ministrations and comforts him by marvellous music. When, despite her urging to the contrary, she finds him determined to leave her, she warns him that if he does so his wounds will break out afresh, and this proves to be the case. When Eger approaches his old home, he feels them so sorely that he falls from his horse, which immediately disappears, and he is abandoned with desperately sad longings for the "far country," the land of all solace. However disfigured, we have here at bottom the same appealing story of a mortal's visit to faery,|| where the art of healing flourishes supreme. The name of the chief hero may be identical with that of Oger le Danois, whose long life of happy youth with Morgain la Fée was to end so disastrously for him when from his head was taken the crown which Morgain had