No More Learning

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, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest he
should eat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into
that bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards
with three of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until
he saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly
all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to
the house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the
keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic
poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my
white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.

Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the
living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John
Kirwan of Castle Hacket.
The Kirwans[H] are a family much rumoured of
in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and a
spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read that the
mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe.

John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpool
with a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. That
evening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and asked
where he was stabling his horse. In such and such a place, he answered.
'Don't put him there,' said the slip of a boy; 'that stable will be
burnt to-night. ' He took his horse elsewhere, and sure enough the
stable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as reward to
ride as his jockey in the coming race, and then was gone. The race-time
came round. At the last moment the boy ran forward and mounted, saying,
'If I strike him with the whip in my left hand I will lose, but if in
my right hand bet all you are worth. ' 'For,' said Paddy Flynn, who told
me the tale, 'the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on making
the sign of the cross with it, and all that, come Christmas, and a
banshee, or such like, would no more mind than if it was that broom. '
Well, the slip of a boy struck the horse with his right hand, and John
Kirwan cleared the field out. When the race was over, 'What can I do
for you now? ' said he. 'Nothing but this,' said the boy: 'my mother
has a cottage on your land--they stole me from the cradle.