the following effect:[1] Once on a time the Tuatha Dé Danann played a game of hurley against the Féni on the plain near the Lake of Lein of the Crooked Teeth, that is to say, the Lakes of Killarney. The game was continued three days and three nights without either side succeeding in winning a single goal from the other; and when the Tuatha Dé Danann saw that they could not prevail, they went away and journeyed northwards in a body. Their food during the contest and during their journey afterwards consisted of crimson nuts, arbutus apples and scarlet quicken-berries, which they had brought from the Land of Promise. These fruits were gifted with many secret virtues, and their owners were careful that neither apple nor nut should touch the soil of Erinn; but in passing through Dubhros they dropped a quicken-berry without observing it. From the berry there grew up a tree which had the virtues of the quicken-tree growing in fairy-land, for all the berries on it had many virtues: every one of them had in it the exhilaration of wine and the satisfying of old mead; and whoever should eat three of them, would, though he had completed his hundredth year, return to the age of thirty.
When the Tuatha Dé Danann heard of that tree in Dubhros and of its many virtues, they wished nobody but themselves to eat of the fruit; so they sent Searbhan of Lochlann to guard it, that no man might approach the tree. Searbhan was a giant of the race of the wicked Cain; he was burly and strong, with heavy bones, a large thick nose, crooked teeth, and a single broad fiery
- ↑ Pursuit of Diarmuid, &c. ij. §§ 11, 13—18: I have freely used in this abstract Dr. Joyce's wording in his Old Celt. Rom. pp. 313—322.
