Nowadays this song is as well known as the one of Mary the Maiden, or the King and the Grey Seal, but it was the first time I had heard it. When he knew who it was who had stopped to listen, he seemed pleased that I should sit beside him on the bank, and ask questions. I remember that on that first morning we talked mostly of the song, then of himself; I found he had been as a young man in Mona, the druids’ isle, and knew Caerynar-Von and had walked on Snowdon. It was in the druids’ isle that he had lost his sight; he never told me how, but when I told him that the sea-weeds and cresses that I hunted along the shore were only plants for healing, not for magic, he smiled and sang a verse I had heard my mother sing, which, he said, would be a shield. Against what, he did not say, nor did I ask him. I put money into his bowl, which he accepted with dignity, but when I promised to find a harp for him he went silent, staring with those empty eye-sockets, and I could see he did not believe me. I brought the harp next day; my father was generous, and I had no need even to tell him what the money was for. When I put the harp into the old singer’s hands he wept, then took my hands and kissed them.

After that, right up to the time I left Less Britain, I often sought him out. He had travelled widely, in lands as far apart as Ireland and Africa. He taught me songs from every country, Italy and Gaul and the white North, and older songs from the East—strange wandering tunes which had come westward, he said, from the islands of the East with the men of old who had raised the standing stones, and they spoke of lores long forgotten except in song. I do not think he himself thought of them as anything but songs of old magic, poets’ tales; but the more I thought about them, the more clearly they spoke to me of men who had really lived, and work they had really done, when they raised the great stones to mark the sun and moon and build for their gods and the giant kings of old.

I said something once about this to Tremorinus, who was kindly as well as clever, and who usually managed to find time for me; but he laughed and put it aside, and I said no more. Ambrosius’ technicians had more than enough to think about in those days, without helping a boy to work out a set of calculations of no practical use in the coming invasion. So I let it be.

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