in that he gave his only eye to save it, Heaven is said to have given him thenceforth two eyes instead of the one he had parted with. He is, moreover, mentioned as one of the great judges of early Ireland; and if one is right in treating this tragic story as having been distorted by the quasi-historical treatment it met at the hands of the euhemerists of Leinster, there is no difficulty in seeing that we have in this Echaid some such a representative, for example, of the world of darkness and death as Balor of the Evil Eye, and one of his names may be inferred to have been Dergderc, or He of the Red Eye, whose abode was associated with the lake. Looking at it in this light, and presuming the sympathy of the Irish narrator to have been, for the reason already suggested, transferred to the wrong side, one may regard his story as a blurred version of the same original, which, in the ingenious hands of the poet of the Odyssey, speaks of Odysseus blinding the single eye of Polyphemus.
From the Shannon, Aitherne makes his way to the court of Tigerna, king of Munster, where he insists on a monstrous demand of a different nature. Thence he proceeds to South Leinster, where he was met by the king and the nobles of the country, who offered to give him the most handsome presents, provided only he abstained from entering their territory; but he paid no heed to their request. When, in the course of his progress, he sat with the king and his nobles in an assembly at a place called Ard Brestine, near Tullow, in the county of Carlow, he said that the only thing that would satisfy him was to have the finest treasure there. They could not divine what it was, and their distress was exceedingly great, but an accident delivered them out of their straits,
