t to his house. She was
'swept' at once; but the Sidhe are said to value those the most whom
they but cast into a half dream, which may last for years, for they need
the help of a living person in most of the things they do. There are
many stories of people who seem to die and be buried--though the country
people will tell you it is but some one or some thing put in their place
that dies and is buried--and yet are brought back afterwards. These
tales are perhaps memories of true awakenings out of the magical sleep,
moulded by the imagination, under the influence of a mystical doctrine
which it understands too literally, into the shape of some well-known
traditional tale. One does not hear them as one hears the others, from
the persons who are 'away,' or from their wives or husbands; and one old
man, who had often seen the Sidhe, began one of them with 'Maybe it is
all vanity.'

Here is a tale that a friend of mine heard in the Burren hills, and it
is a type of all:--

'There was a girl to be married, and she didn't like the man, and she
cried when the day was coming, and said she wouldn't go along with him.
And the mother said, "Get into the bed, then, and I'll say that you're
sick." And so she did. And when the man came the mother said to him,
"You can't get her, she's sick in the bed." And he looked in and said,
"That's not my wife that's in the bed, it's some old hag." And the
mother began to cry and to roar. And he went out and got two hampers of
turf, and made a fire, that they thought he was going to burn the house
down. And when the fire was kindled, "Come out now," says he, "and we'll
see who you are, when I'll put you on the fire." And when she heard
that, she gave one leap, and was out of the house, and they saw, then,
it was an old hag she was. Well, the man asked the advice of an old
woman, and she bid him go to a faery-bush that was near, and he might
get some word of her. So he went there at night, and saw all sorts of
grand people, and they in carriages or riding on horses, and among them
he could see the girl he came to look for. So he went again to the old
woman, and she said, "If you can get the three bits of blackthorn out of
her hair, you'll get her again." So that night he went again, and that
time he only got hold of a bit of her hair. But the old woman told him
that was no use, and that he was put back now, and it might be twelve
nights before he'd get her. But on the fourth night he got the thir