Three Wonder Plays. Lady Gregory

He was a widower man.

      King: As to the heir of Orkney, since the time you sent him to the right about, I never got so much as a conger eel from his hand.

      Princess: As dull as a fish he was. He had a fish's eyes.

      King: That wasn't so with the champion of the merings of Ulster.

      Princess: A freckled man. He had hair the colour of a fox.

      King: I wish he didn't stop sending me his tribute of heather beer.

      Queen: It is a poor daughter that will not wish to be helpful to her father.

      Princess: If I am to wed for the furnishing of my father's table, it's as good for you to wrap me in a speckled fawnskin and roast me!

      (Runs out, tossing her ball.)

      Queen: She is no way fit for marriage unless with a herd to the birds of the air, till she has a couple of years schooling.

      King: It would be hard to put her back to that.

      Queen: I must take it in hand. She is getting entirely too much of her own way.

      Nurse: Leave her alone, and in the end it will be a good way.

      Queen: To keep rules and hours she must learn, and to give in to order and good sense. (To King.) There is a pigeon messenger I brought from Alban I am about to let loose on this day with news of myself and of yourself. I will send with it a message to a friend I have, bidding her to make ready for Nuala a place in her garden of learning and her school.

      King: That is going too fast. There is no hurry.

      Queen: She is seventeen years. There is no day to be lost. I will go write the letter.

      Nurse: Oh, you wouldn't send away the poor child!

      Dall Glic: It would be a great hardship to send her so far. Our poor little Princess Nu!

      Queen: (Sharply.) What are saying? (Dall Glic is silent.)

      King: I would not wish her to be sent out of this.

      Queen: There is no other way to set her mind to sense and learning. It will be for her own good.

      Nurse: Where's the use troubling her with lessons and with books that maybe she will never be in need of at all. Speak up for her, King.

      King: Let her stop for this year as she is.

      Queen: You are all too soft and too easy. She will turn on you and will blame you for it, and another year or two years slipped by.

      Nurse: That she may!

      Dall Glic: Who knows what might take place within the twelvemonth that is coming?

      King: Ah, don't be talking about it. Maybe it never might come to pass.

      Dall Glic: It will come to pass, if there is truth in the clouds of sky.

      King: It will not be for a year, anyway. There'll be many an ebbing and flowing of the tide within a year.

      Queen: What at all are you talking about?

      King: Ah, where's the use of talking too much.

      Queen: Making riddles you are, and striving to keep the meaning from your comrade, that is myself.

      King: It's best not be thinking about the thing you would not wish, and maybe it might never come around at all. To strive to forget a threat yourself, it might maybe be forgotten by the universe.

      Queen: Is it true something was threatened?

      King: How would I know is anything true, and the world so full of lies as it is?

      Nurse: That is so. He might have been wrong in his foretelling. What is he in the finish but an old prophecy?

      Dall Glic: Is it of Fintan you are saying that?

      Queen: And who, will you tell me, is Fintan?

      Dall Glic: Anyone that never heard tell of Fintan never heard anything at all.

      Queen: His name was not up on the tablets of big men at the King of Alban's Court, or of Britain.

      Nurse: Ah, sure in those countries they are without religion or belief.

      Queen: Is it that there was a prophecy?

      King: Don't mind it. What are prophecies? Don't we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.

      Queen: (To Dall Glic.) I must get to the root of this, and the handle. Who, now, is Fintan?

      Dall Glic: He is an astrologer, and understanding the nature of the stars.

      Nurse: He wore out in his lifetime three eagles and three palm trees and three earthen dykes. It is down in a cleft of the rocks beyond he has his dwelling presently, the way he can be watching the stars through the daytime.

      Dall Glic: He prophesied in a prophecy, and it is written in clean letters in the King's yew-tree box.

      King: It is best to keep it out of sight. It being to be, it will be; and, if not, where's the use troubling our mind?

      Queen: Sound it out to me.

      Dall Glic: (Looking from window and drawing curtain.) There is no story in the world is worse to me or more pitiful; I wouldn't wish any person to hear.

      Nurse: Oh, take care it would come to the ears of my darling Nu!

      Dall Glic: It is said by himself and the heavens that in a year from this day the King's daughter will be brought away and devoured by a scaly Green Dragon that will come from the North of the World.

      Queen: A Dragon! I thought you were talking of some danger. I wouldn't give in to dragons. I never saw one. I'm not in dread of beasts unless it might be a mouse in the night-time!

      King: Put it out of mind. It is likely anyway that the world will soon be ended the way it is.

      Queen: I will send and search out this astrologer and will question him.

      Dall Glic: You have not far to search. He is outside at the kitchen door at this minute, and as if questioning after something, and it a half-score and seven years since I knew him to come out of his cave.

      King: Do not! He might waken up the Dragon and put him in mind of the girl, for to make his own foretelling come true.

      Nurse: Ah, such a thing cannot be! The poor innocent child! (Weeps.)

      Queen: Where's the use of crying and roaring? The thing must be stopped and put an end to. I don't say I give in to your story, but that would be an unnatural death. I would be scandalised being stepmother to a girl that would be swallowed by a sea-serpent!

      Nurse: Ochone! Don't be talking of it at all!

      Queen: At the King of Alban's Court, one of the royal family to die over, it will be naturally on a pillow, and the dead-bells ringing, and a burying with white candles, and crape on the knocker of the door, and a flagstone put over the grave. What way could we put a stone or so much as a rose-bush over Nuala and she in the inside of a water-worm might be ploughing its way down to the north of the world?

      Nurse: Och! that is what is killing me entirely! O save her, save her.

      King: I tell you, it being to be, it will be.

      Queen: You may be right, so, when you would not go to the expense of paying