upon him
and a shirt-buzzom that was never starched in this world.' She would
have mixed some quaint poetry with it, however; for there is a world
of difference between Benbulben and Dublinised Clondalkin.

Heaven and Fairyland--to these has Biddy Hart given all she dreams of
magnificence, and to them her soul goes out--to the one in love and
hope, to the other in love and fear--day after day and season after
season; saints and angels, fairies and witches, haunted thorn-trees
and holy wells, are to her what books, and plays, and pictures are to
you and me. Indeed they are far more; for too many among us grow
prosaic and commonplace, but she keeps ever a heart full of music. 'I
stand here in the doorway,' she said once to me on a fine day, 'and
look at the mountain and think of the goodness of God'; and when she
talks of the fairies I have noticed a touch of tenderness in her
voice. She loves them because they are always young, always making
festival, always far off from the old age that is coming upon her and
filling her bones with aches, and because, too, they are so like
little children.

Do you think the Irish peasant would be so full of poetry if he had
not his fairies? Do you think the peasant girls of Donegal, when they
are going to service inland, would kneel down as they do and kiss the
sea with their lips if both sea and land were not made lovable to them
by beautiful legends and wild sad stories? Do you think the old men
would take life so cheerily and mutter their proverb, 'The lake is not
burdened by its swan, the steed by its bridle, or a man by the soul
that is in him,' if the multitude of spirits were not near them?

W. B. YEATS.

CLONDALKIN,

_July 1891_.

NOTE

I have to thank Lady Wilde for leave to give 'Seanchan the Bard' from
her _Ancient Legends of Ireland_ (Ward and Downey), the most poetical
and ample collection of Irish folklore yet published; Mr. Standish
O'Grady for leave to give 'The Knighting of Cuculain' from that prose
epic he has curiously named _History of Ireland, Heroic Period_;
Professor Joyce for his 'Fergus O'Mara and the Air Demons'; and Mr.
Douglas Hyde for his unpublished story, 'The Man who never knew
Fear.'

I have included no story that has already appeared in my _Fairy and
Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry_ (Camelot Series).

The two volumes make, I believe, a fairly representative collection of
Irish folk tales.

LAND AND WATER FAIRIES