Conal went under the window; and the king’s daughter, looking down, fell deeply in love with him. “I am too high, and you are too low,” said the Yellow King’s daughter. “If we speak, people will hear us all over the castle; but I’ll take some golden cord, and try can I draw you up to me, that we may speak a few words to each other.”
“It would be a poor case for me,” said young Conal, “to wait till you could tie strings together to raise me.” He stuck his sword in the earth then, and, making one bound, went in at the window. The princess embraced him and kissed him; she knew not what to give him to eat or to drink, or what would please him most.
“Have you seen the people at the seven gates?” asked the Yellow King’s daughter.
“I have,” answered Conal.
“They are all awake now, and I will go down and walk through the gates with you; seeing me, the guards will not stop us.”
“I will not do that. It will never be said of young Conal of Erin that he stole his wife from her father. I will win you with strength, or not have you.”
“I’m afraid there is too much against you,” said the Yellow King’s daughter.
These words enraged Conal, and, making one bound through the window, he went to the pole of combat, and struck a blow that roused the old hag in the eastern world, and shook the castle with all the land around it. The Yellow King was sleeping at the time; the shake that he got threw him out of his bed. He fell to the floor with such force that a great lump came out on his forehead; he was so frightened that he said to the old druid who ran in to help him, “Many a year have I lived without hearing the like of that blow. There must be a great champion outside the castle.”
The guard was sent to see if any one was left alive near the castle. “For,” said the king, “such a champion must have killed all the people at the gates.” The guard went, saw no one dead, but every one living, and a champion walking around, sword in hand.
The guard hurried back, and said to the king, “There is a champion in front of the castle, handsome, but slender and young.”