III.—THE STORY OF PATRICK AND THE ROYAL DAUGHTERS.
HE following story, which is given in Tirechan's collection, found in the Book of Armagh, bears internal evidence of its antiquity and genuineness. 'The naïveté of the questions asked by the girls about God and His sons and daughters' is one of these striking evidences, for they are, as Whitley Stokes observes, 'questions which no mere legend-monger ever had the imagination to invent.' The narrative is quite superior to the surroundings in which it occurs in Tírechán (Rolls Tripartite, p. 314), or in the later Tripartite Life (pp. 99 ff.). We have translated it from the former, adding in the notes the more important readings found in the Tripartite Life.
But thence went the holy Patrick to the spring which is called Clebach,[1] on the sides of Crochan,[2] towards the rising of the sun, before the rising of
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