No More Learning

There was a man thereabouts who went to a red-haired woman--for
such are supposed to be wise in these things--and she told him to take
the calf down to the edge of the river, and hide himself and watch.
He did as she had told him, and as evening came on the calf began
to low, and after a while the cow came along the edge of the river
and commenced suckling it. Then, as he had been told, he caught the
cow's tail. Away they went at a great pace, across hedges and ditches,
till they came to a royalty (a name for the little circular ditches,
commonly called raths or forts, that Ireland is covered with since
Pagan times). Therein he saw walking or sitting all the people who had
died out of his village in his time. A woman was sitting on the edge
with a child on her knees, and she called out to him to mind what the
red-haired woman had told him, and he remembered she had said, 'Bleed
the cow. ' So he stuck his knife into the cow and drew blood. That broke
the spell, and he was able to turn her homeward. 'Do not forget the
spancel,' said the woman with the child on her knees; 'take the inside
one. ' There were three spancels on a bush; he took one, and the cow was
driven safely home to the widow.

There is hardly a valley or mountain-side where folk cannot tell you of
some one pillaged from amongst them. Two or three miles from the Heart
Lake lives an old woman who was stolen away in her youth. After seven
years she was brought home again for some reason or other, but she had
no toes left. She had danced them off. Many near the white stone door
in Ben Bulben have been stolen away.
It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places
I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening by
the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint
mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily
discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures,
the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or
from the Heart Lake in the south.

FOOTNOTE:

[H] I have since heard that it was not the Kirwans, but their
predecessors at Castle Hacket, the Hackets themselves, I think, who
were descended from a man and a spirit, and were notable for beauty.
I imagine that the mother of Lord Cloncurry was descended from the
Hackets. It may well be that all through these stories the name of
Kirwan has taken the place of the older name. Legend mixes everything
together in her cauldron.




THE UNTIRING ONES


IT is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed
emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and
something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement
of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the
furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good heart
as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until
that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their
fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of
the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal peasants remember
this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of the heaviness of the
fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell stories about it
that it may not be forgotten. A short while ago, they say, two faeries,
little creatures, one like a young man, one like a young woman, came
to a farmer's house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth and
setting all tidy. The next night they came again, and while the farmer
was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one room, and having
arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeur it seems, they
began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and days went by, and
all the country-side came to look at them, but still their feet never
tired.