第63章

Danes!thought I,Danes!and instantaneously,huge and grisly,appeared to rise up before my vision the skull of the old pirate Dane,even as I had seen it of yore in the pent-house of the ancient church to which,with my mother and my brother,I had wandered on the memorable summer eve.

And now the old man handed me the book;a strange and uncouth-looking volume enough.It was not very large,but instead of the usual covering was bound in wood,and was compressed with strong iron clasps.It was a printed book,but the pages were not of paper,but vellum,and the characters were black,and resembled those generally termed Gothic.

'It is certainly a curious book,'said I;'and I should like to have it,but I can't think of taking it as a gift,I must give you an equivalent,I never take presents from anybody.'

The old man whispered with his dame and chuckled,and then turned his face to me,and said,with another chuckle,'Well,we have agreed about the price,but,maybe,you will not consent.'

'I don't know,'said I;'what do you demand?'

'Why,that you shake me by the hand,and hold out your cheek to my old dame,she has taken an affection to you.'

'I shall be very glad to shake you by the hand,'said I,'but as for the other condition,it requires consideration.'

'No consideration at all,'said the old man,with something like a sigh;'she thinks you like her son,our only child,that was lost twenty years ago in the waves of the North Sea.'

'Oh,that alters the case altogether,'said I,'and of course I can have no objection.'

And now at once I shook off my listlessness,to enable me to do which nothing could have happened more opportune than the above event.The Danes,the Danes!And was I at last to become acquainted,and in so singular a manner,with the speech of a people which had as far back as I could remember exercised the strongest influence over my imagination,as how should they not!-in infancy there was the summer-eve adventure,to which I often looked back,and always with a kind of strange interest with respect to those to whom such gigantic and wondrous bones could belong as I had seen on that occasion;and,more than this,I had been in Ireland,and there,under peculiar circumstances,this same interest was increased tenfold.I had mingled much whilst there with the genuine Irish-a wild but kind-hearted race,whose conversation was deeply imbued with traditionary lore,connected with the early history of their own romantic land,and from them I heard enough of the Danes,but nothing commonplace,for they never mentioned them but in terms which tallied well with my own preconceived ideas.For at an early period the Danes had invaded Ireland,and had subdued it,and,though eventually driven out,had left behind them an enduring remembrance in the minds of the people,who loved to speak of their strength and their stature,in evidence of which they would point to the ancient raths or mounds where the old Danes were buried,and where bones of extraordinary size were occasionally exhumed.And as the Danes surpassed other people in strength,so,according to my narrators,they also excelled all others in wisdom,or rather in Draoitheac,or magic,for they were powerful sorcerers,they said,compared with whom the fairy men of the present day knew nothing at all,at all;and,amongst other wonderful things,they knew how to make strong beer from the heather that grows upon the bogs.Little wonder if the interest,the mysterious interest,which I had early felt about the Danes,was increased tenfold by my sojourn in Ireland.