day), and so ward off their
displeasure, in case they were angry at our notice, for they love to
live and dance unknown of men.

Once started, she talked on freely enough, her face glowing in the
firelight as she bent over the griddle or stirred the turf, and told
how such a one was stolen away from near Coloney village and made to
live seven years among 'the gentry,' as she calls the fairies for
politeness' sake, and how when she came home she had no toes, for she
had danced them off; and how such another was taken from the
neighbouring village of Grange and compelled to nurse the child of the
queen of the fairies a few months before I came. Her news about the
creatures is always quite matter-of-fact and detailed, just as if she
dealt with any common occurrence: the late fair, or the dance at
Rosses last year, when a bottle of whisky was given to the best man,
and a cake tied up in ribbons to the best woman dancer. They are, to
her, people not so different from herself, only grander and finer in
every way. They have the most beautiful parlours and drawing-rooms,
she would tell you, as an old man told me once. She has endowed them
with all she knows of splendour, although that is not such a great
deal, for her imagination is easily pleased. What does not seem to us
so very wonderful is wonderful to her, there, where all is so homely
under her wood rafters and her thatched ceiling covered with
whitewashed canvas. We have pictures and books to help us imagine a
splendid fairy world of gold and silver, of crowns and marvellous
draperies; but she has only that little picture of St. Patrick over
the fireplace, the bright-coloured crockery on the dresser, and the
sheet of ballads stuffed by her young daughter behind the stone dog
on the mantelpiece. Is it strange, then, if her fairies have not the
fantastic glories of the fairies you and I are wont to see in
picture-books and read of in stories? She will tell you of peasants
who met the fairy cavalcade and thought it but a troop of peasants
like themselves until it vanished into shadow and night, and of great
fairy palaces that were mistaken, until they melted away, for the
country seats of rich gentlemen.

Her views of heaven itself have the same homeliness, and she would be
quite as naive about its personages if the chance offered as was the
pious Clondalkin laundress who told a friend of mine that she had seen
a vision of St. Joseph, and that he had 'a lovely shining hat