tioned as relating how Cúchulainn rescued the daughter of Ruad king of the Isles (p. 464), the Fomori assume the place occupied by the dragon of the legends of other lands. The king's daughter had been exposed, as you will remember, on the sea-shore as tribute to the Fomori, three of whom were hourly expected to arrive from distant, islands to fetch her. Cúchulainn, on hearing this, hastened to the princess and learned her story from her own lips. She charged him to leave before the Fomori arrived, which he declined to do. The three Fomori came at last, and Cúchulainn slew them. The rest of the story is mostly of the usual kind; for in fighting with the last of the three, Cúchulainn was wounded in one of his fingers, and the princess, tearing a strip of her dress, tied it round the finger of her rescuer, who thereupon departed without giving his name. Then many a braggart asserted that it was he who had slain the Fomori, wherefore he claimed the princess to wife, according to the proclamation previously made by her father. But the princess believed none of them, and the claimants were called together, when Cúchulainn was recognized. In this story it will be observed that the three Fomori stand for so many heads of the dragon in the better known versions told among other peoples; but it is more perhaps to the point that the Welsh equivalent is the avanc of the Conwy, in whose name the counterpart of that of the Irish abac, as applied to one of the Luchorpáin, has been pointed out. The Welsh avanc was, however, no 'small body,' but a big monster, while a girl is involved in the oldest known version of the story of Hu the Mighty's feat, and in some respects the avanc in it behaves like a Scotch kelpie.
