CHAPTER VI.
THE FOUR WHITE SWANS ON THE WESTERN SEA.
And when their three hundred years were ended, Finola said to her brothers—
"It is time for us to leave this place, for our period here has come to an end."
The hour has come; the hour has come;
Three hundred years have passed:
We leave this bleak and gloomy home,
And we fly to the west at last!
We leave for ever the stream of Moyle;
On the clear, cold wind we go;
Three hundred years round Glora's isle,
Where wintry tempests blow!
No sheltered home, no place of rest,
From the tempest's angry blast:
Fly, brothers, fly, to the distant west,
For the hour has come at last!
So the swans left the Sea of Moyle, and flew westward, till they reached Irros Domnann and the sea round the isle of Glora. There they remained for a long time, suffering much from storm and cold, and in nothing better off than they were on the Sea of Moyle.
It chanced that a young man named Ebric, of good family, the owner of a tract of land lying along the shore, observed the birds and heard their singing. He took great delight in listening to their plaintive music, and he walked down to the shore almost every day, to see them and to converse with them; so that he came to love them very much, and they also loved him. This young man told his neighbours about the speaking swans, so that the matter became noised abroad; and it was he who arranged the story, after hearing it from themselves, and related it as it is related here.
Again their hardships were renewed, and to describe what they suffered on the great open Western Sea would be only to tell over again the story of their life on the Moyle. But one particular night came, of frost so hard that the whole face of the sea, from Irros Domnann to Achill, was frozen into a thick floor of ice; and the snow was driven by a north-west wind. On that night it seemed to the three brothers that they could not bear their sufferings any longer, and they began to utter loud and pitiful complaints. Finola tried to console them, but she was not able to do so, for they only lamented the more; and then she herself began to lament with the others.