e
probably believed that a log of wood was left behind in his place, but
so bewitched that it seemed the dead body of her husband.

She is dead now herself, but many still living remember her. She was,
I believe, for a time a servant or else a kind of pensioner of some
relations of my own.

Sometimes those who are carried off are allowed after many years--
seven usually--a final glimpse of their friends. Many years ago a woman
vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her
husband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he received
word in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured by
faeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longing
to see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to the
peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being a
dutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets of
Glasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She was
happy, she said, and had the best of good eating, and would he not eat?
and therewith laid all kinds of food on the table; but he, knowing well
that she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faery
food, that she might keep him with her, refused and came home to his
people in Sligo.

Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond,
a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the
Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild
duck. Out of this lake, as from the white square stone in Ben Bulben,
issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one of
them raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round,
and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home to
find it was but faery glamour. To this hour on the border of the lake
is shown a half-dug trench--the signet of their impiety. A little way
from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of faery
kidnapping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, who
sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as
though she remembered the dancing of her youth.

A young man going at nightfall to the house of his just married bride,
met in the way a jolly company, and with them his bride. They were
faeries, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band. To
him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when she
saw her old love,