, and let the little hands play with his
beard.

Sitting together in the firelight on winter nights, while the peat fire
was burning on the floor, and the wind, sweeping across Lough Eske, went
wailing round the castle walls and sighing in the leafless trees, the
boy would often get his father to tell him stories of the country-side.
There were many strange legends treasured up in the memories of all old
inhabitants of the place, wild stories of enchantments, or of fairies or
banshees; and little Dermot would never tire of listening to these
tales. Sometimes, when he had heard some only half-finished story, he
would go dreaming on and on to himself about it, till he had woven an
ending, or a dozen endings, to it in his own brain.

But of all the tales to which he used to listen there was one that
perhaps, more than any other, he liked to hear--the story of the
enchanted castle swallowed up by Lough Belshade. There, down beneath the
waters of the dark lough, into which he had looked so often, was the
castle standing still, its gates and towers and walls all perfect, just
as it had stood upon the earth, the very fires still alight that had
been burning on its hearths, and--more wonderful than all--the people
who had been sunk in it, though fixed and motionless in their enchanted
sleep, alive too. It was a wonder of wonders; the child was never tired
of thinking of it, and dreaming of the time in which the enchantment
should be broken, and of the person who should break it; for, strangest
of all, the story said that they must sleep until a M'Swyne should come
and wake them. But what M'Swyne would do it? And how was it to be done?
"Father," little Dermot would say, "tell me something more about the
enchanted castle in the lough."

The legend was thus: On the shores of the desolate lough there had once
stood a great castle, where lived a beautiful maiden called Eileen. Her
father was the chieftain of a clan, and she was his only child. Many
young lovers sought her, but she cared for none of them. At last there
came to the castle a noble-looking knight. He had traveled from a far
country, he said, and he began soon to tell wonderful stories to Eileen
of the beauty and the richness of that land of his; how the skies there
were always blue, and the sun always shone, and lords and ladies lived,
not in rough stone-hewn castles like these, but in palaces all bright
with marbles and precious stones; and how their lives were all a