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V. THE SUN HERO.

green and the other in red, came up to him: the one in green smiled at him and struck him a blow with a whip, the one in red did the same thing, and this horse-whipping of the hero went on till he was nearly dead. His friends came and would have waked him, had not one of them suggested that he was probably dreaming, so they were careful not to disturb his nap. When at length he woke, he would tell them nothing, and he bade them place him in his bed. This all took place on the eve of November, when the Celtic year begins with the ascendency of the powers of darkness. When Cúchulainn had lain in his bed, speaking to nobody, for nearly a year, and the Ultonian nobles and his wife happened to be around him, some on the bed and the others close by, they suddenly found a stranger seated on the side of the bed. He said he had come to speak to Cúchulainn, and he sang a song in which he informed him that he had come from his sister Fand and his sister Liban to tell him that they would soon heal him if they were allowed. Fand, he said, had conceived great love for him, and would give him her hand if he only visited her land, and treat him to plenty of silver and gold, together with much wine to drink. She would, moreover, send her sister Liban on November-eve to heal him. After having added that his own name was Aengus, brother to Fand and Liban, he disappeared as mysteriously as he had come. Cúchulainn then sat up in his bed and told his friends all about the dream which had made him ill: he was advised to go to the spot where it occurred to him twelve months previously, for such are the requirements of the fairy reckoning of time. He did so, and he beheld the woman in green coming