She tried to comfort them, and she told them again
and again the story that she had heard from the people who stood by
the lake to hear them sing, the story that the King had told, that,
after many hundreds of years, strange men should come across the sea
to Erin--men with shaven heads; that they should build houses and set
up tables in the east ends of their houses, and that they should ring
bells; and when the swans should hear the first sound of those bells
they should have their human shape again, and then they should be
happy forever.
"For three hundred years they were at Loch Derg, and then, by the
power of their enchantment, they were compelled to leave it. They flew
to the sea of Moyle, and there they stayed, through the summer's heat
and the winter's cold, for three hundred years more. Still the sister
told her brothers of the strange men who were to come to Erin and of
the bells that were to free them. But they could not be comforted. The
strange men were too long in coming.
"When the three hundred years were past they had to fly away again to
another sea.
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