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The brazen voices of the bells tolled out across the countryside as the stone-haulers bore the antiquated form of Oisin to Saint Patrick’s door. The priest stepped out, dressed in his austere robes. Patrick was no young man himself, but he remained sprightly and keen.

“Who is this grandfather you have brought to me?” he inquired.

“He is a stranger to us, Father, but he declared he is Oisin son of Fionn mac Cumhail.”

“Father Patrick, it was the strangest thing.When we first saw him he was a youth. Then he fell from his horse, and in the blink of an eye he turned into the old fellow you see before you.”

“It is the most astonishing sight we have ever seen, and the most fearsome.”

“What should we do?”

Patrick knew what they were talking about, and he was intrigued. He held great respect for the old traditions and folktales, and he was aware that Oisin was known as the poet and historian of the Fianna, and if anyone could tell him the ancient stories, it was Oisin.

“Bring him inside. Leave him with me. I shall take care of him.”

Greatly relieved, the men did as he bade them, and hastened away.

THE FIRST SOUND Oisin heard when he had recovered his wits was the pealing of the bells. He pulled himself up on his elbow and turned his balding head about distractedly. Naught could he see, for he was blind.

“What is that noise?” he shrieked with his cracked and ancient voice. “So loud, so harsh. It is clanging through my skull like ham-merblows!”

“Hush,” said the priest. “They are the church bells chiming for prayers.”

But Oisin moaned, and sank back onto his pallet and would not be appeased. “Och! Here I lie, listening to the voices of bells. It is long the clouds are over me tonight.”

Patrick allowed Oisin to sleep in his cottage and gave him food to eat. When Oisin had recovered sufficiently from his terrible ordeal, the priest asked him to relate the old stories so that he might write them down, thus preserving them for future generations.

It came to Oisin that this was the only way to correct the lies that people were telling about the Fianna, so he agreed. But as he related the stories to Patrick, he relived the memories, and he could not help but sometimes break off to give vent to his despair.

“Oh, how I wish I could see my father once more! It was a delight to Fionn, the cry of his hounds on the mountains, the wild dogs leaving their harbors, the pride of his armies, those were his delights.My grief! I to be stopping after him and without delight in games or in music; to be withering away after my comrades; my grief is to be living. If you had been in company with the Fianna, Patrick of the joyless clerks and of the bells, you would not be attending on schools or giving heed to your God.”

Clang! clang! The church bells reverberated sonorously across the countryside.

“I would rather hear the blackbird’s song,” said Oisin, heaving a sigh. “Blackbird of Doire an Chairn, your voice is sweet; I never heard on any height of the world music that was sweeter than your voice. If myself and the Fianna were on the top of a hill today drawing our spear heads, we would have our choice of being here or there in spite of books and priests and bells.”

Patrick replied softly, “You were like the smoke o’ a wisp, or like a stream in a valley, or like a whirling wind on the top of a hill, every tribe of you that ever lived.”

But Oisin continued his lament. “The time Fionn lived and the Fianna, it was sweet to them to be listening to the whistle of the blackbird; the voice of the bells would not have been sweet to them. If you knew the story of the bird the way I know it, you would be crying lasting tears, and you would give no heed to your God for a while. In the country of Lochlann of the blue streams, Fionn, son of Cumhal of the red-gold cups found that bird. Doire an Chairn, that wood there to the west where the Fianna used to linger; it is there they put the blackbird, in the beauty of the pleasant trees.

Clang! droned the bells. The reverberations hummed