The (in effect) ' It is well pleased I am that your 



C f h Wind n Gaelic has not become rusty.' 

 and the ** was a ^ ter tne tea-things had been set 

 Clan of aside, and old Mrs. Logan had said reverently, 

 Peace. larramcdd beannachadh (' Let us ask a bless- 

 ing '), that she told me, among other legendary 

 things and fragments of old natural -history 

 folklore, the following legend (or holy Christ- 

 mas tale, as she called it) as to how the first 

 crows were black and the first doves white. 



I will tell it as simply but also with what 

 beauty I can, because her own words, which I 

 recall only as the fluctuating remembrance 

 from a dream and so must translate from the 

 terms of dream into the terms of prose, 

 though simple were beautiful with ancient 

 idiom. 



Thus she began : Feumaidh sinn dol air 

 ar ri-ais dluth fichead ceud bliadhna, which is 

 to say, ' We must go back near two thousand 

 (lit : twenty hundred) years.' 



Yes, it is nigh upon twenty hundred years 

 that we must go back. It was in the last 

 month of the last year of the seven years' 

 silence and peace. When would that be, you 

 ask ? Surely what other would it be than the 

 seven holy years when Jesus the Christ was a 

 little lad. Do you not remember the lore of 

 248 



