No More Learning

His cows and horses died, and all manner of
trouble overtook him, and finally he himself was led home, and left
useless with 'his head on his knees by the fire to the day of his
death. '

A few hundred yards southwards of the northern angle of Rosses is
another angle having also its cave, though this one is not covered with
sand. About twenty years ago a brig was wrecked near by, and three
or four fishermen were put to watch the deserted hulk through the
darkness. At midnight they saw sitting on a stone at the cave's mouth
two red-capped fiddlers fiddling with all their might. The men fled. A
great crowd of villagers rushed down to the cave to see the fiddlers,
but the creatures had gone.

To the wise peasant the green hills and woods round him are full of
never-fading mystery. When the aged countrywoman stands at her door
in the evening, and, in her own words, 'looks at the mountains and
thinks of the goodness of God,' God is all the nearer, because the
pagan powers are not far: because northward in Ben Bulben, famous for
hawks, the white square door swings open at sundown, and those wild
unchristian riders rush forth upon the fields, while southward the
White Lady, who is doubtless Maive herself, wanders under the broad
cloud nightcap of Knocknarea. How may she doubt these things, even
though the priest shakes his head at her? Did not a herd-boy, no long
while since, see the White Lady? She passed so close that the skirt of
her dress touched him. 'He fell down, and was dead three days. ' But
this is merely the small gossip of faerydom--the little stitches that
join this world and the other.

One night as I sat eating Mrs. H----'s soda-bread, her husband told me a
longish story, much the best of all I heard in Rosses.
Many a poor man
from Fin M'Cool to our own days has had some such adventure to tell
of, for those creatures, the 'good people,' love to repeat themselves.
At any rate the story-tellers do. 'In the times when we used to travel
by the canal,' he said, 'I was coming down from Dublin. When we came to
Mullingar the canal ended, and I began to walk, and stiff and fatigued
I was after the slowness. I had some friends with me, and now and then
we walked, now and then we rode in a cart. So on till we saw some girls
milking cows, and stopped to joke with them. After a while we asked
them for a drink of milk. "We have nothing to put it in here," they
said, "but come to the house with us. " We went home with them, and sat
round the fire talking. After a while the others went, and left me,
loath to stir from the good fire. I asked the girls for something to
eat. There was a pot on the fire, and they took the meat out and put it
on a plate, and told me to eat only the meat that came off the head.
When I had eaten, the girls went out, and I did not see them again. It
grew darker and darker, and there I still sat, loath as ever to leave
the good fire, and after a while two men came in, carrying between them
a corpse. When I saw them coming I hid behind the door. Says one to the
other, putting the corpse on the spit, "Who'll turn the spit?