any sorrow.
As the stars in heaven
Are the cattle in the valleys.

"Great rivers wander
Through flowery plains.
Streams of milk, of mead,
Streams of strong ale.

"There is no hunger
And no thirst
In the Hollow Land,
In the Land of Youth."

SHARP: _Immortal Hour._

She and Midir fly away in the form of two swans, linked by a chain
of gold.

Cuchulain, hopelessly sick of a strange illness brought on by Fand
and Liban, fairy sisters, was visited the day before Samhain by a
messenger, who promised to cure him if he would go to the
Otherworld. Cuchulain could not make up his mind to go, but sent
Laeg, his charioteer. Such glorious reports did Laeg bring back
from the Otherworld,

"If all Erin were mine,
And the kingship of yellow Bregia,
I would give it, no trifling deed,
To dwell for aye in the place I reached."

_Cuchulain's Sick-bed._ (Meyer _trans._)

that Cuchulain went thither, and championed the people there
against their enemies. He stayed a month with the fairy Fand. Emer,
his wife at home, was beset with jealousy, and plotted against
Fand, who had followed her hero home. Fand in fear returned to her
deserted husband, Emer was given a Druidic drink to drown her
jealousy, and Cuchulain another to forget his infatuation, and they
lived happily afterward.

Even after Christianity was made the vital religion in Ireland, it
was believed that places not exorcised by prayers and by the sign
of the cross, were still haunted by Druids. As late as the fifth
century the Druids kept their skill in fortune-telling. King Dathi
got a Druid to foretell what would happen to him from one
Hallowe'en to the next, and the prophecy came true. Their religion
was now declared evil, and all evil or at any rate suspicious
beings were assigned to them or to the devil as followers.

"_Maire Bruin:_
Are not they, likewise, the children of God?

_Father Hart:_
Colleen, they are the children of the fiend,
And they have power until the end of Time,
When God shall fight with them a great pitched battle
And hack them into pieces."

YEATS: _Land of Heart's Desire._

The power of fairy music was so great that St. Patrick himself was
put to sleep by a minstrel who appeared to him on the day before
Samhain. The Tuatha De Danann, angere