truth. Never a butler could he keep in his service. A new butler would
come and he'ld think he was a made man, old MacCarthy was that well
known and that well liked all over the counthry. He'ld wait once at
dinner and then down he'ld go to the cellar for wine. Sometimes he'ld
come back wid the wine and oftener he'ld come back widout it, but
every time he'ld say: 'Mr. MacCarthy, sir, it's much obliged to you I
am for all your kindness, but I'll have to be lavin' your service
to-morrow.' And nobody could see the why of it.
"And at long last there was young Jack Leary, that had been all his
life in old MacCarthy's stable, and he knew how the old man was bad
off for a butler, and he made bold to ask for the place. 'If I make ye
me butler,' says the old man, 'will ye go into the cellar and bring
the wine when I ask ye, and make no throuble about it?'
"'Is that all?' says Jack; 'sure, yer honor, I'ld be glad to spend all
me time, day and night, in the cellar, only ye might be wantin' me
somewhere else now and then.'
"'Then look sharp,' says old MacCarthy, 'for there's gintlemin comin'
to dinner to-day. Wait on the table the best ye know how, and at the
end of it, when I ring the bell three times, do ye go to the cellar
and bring plenty of wine, and let's have no more nonsinse about it.'
"'Niver say it twice,' says Jack; 'yer honor can depind on me.'
"Well, ye may belave I was listenin' to all this, for I wasn't in the
cellar all the time. 'His honor may say it twice,' says I to meself,
'or as many times as he likes, but you'll never go into that cellar
twice, Jack, me fine boy.'
"So Jack went about his work, and the dinner went all well enough,
till late in the evenin', when old MacCarthy rang the bell three
times, and off started Jack for the cellar, wid a basket to bring back
the wine. 'It's the silly lot they war,' says he to himself, 'thim
butlers, that they'ld be afraid to go to the cellar and bring back a
bit of a basket full of wine. The only thing I don't like about it is
that I can't bring it back in me skin instead of in the basket.'
"He was thinkin' like this in his mind as he went down the long, dark
stairs wid his candle, and you may depend I was ready for him, by the
time he got to the bottom. So no sooner did he touch the key to the
lock than I give him a sort of a laugh and a scream that set the empty
wine bottles that stood outside the door a-dancin' together. Jack was
a good bold boy, sure enough, and he got the key into the lock and
turned it. Wid that I swung the door open for him, so hard that it
crashed against the wall and near shook the house down. And then me
fine boy saw all the casks and the hogsheads in the cellar a-swingin'
and a-rockin' and a-whirlin' around, as if all the wine had been in
him instead of in them.
"You may be sure he didn't wait long afther that, but he just dropped
his basket and fell all the way up the stairs and into the room where
the gintlemin was waitin' for their wine. Well, it was then that old
MacCarthy was in the towerin' rage. Never a word could Jack say to
tell where he'd been or how he came back, or why.
"'Gintlemin,' says MacCarthy, 'ye'll get your wine, if I have to go to
the cellar for it meself. But this I tell ye: I'll live no longer in
this house, where I can't get servants to serve me. I'll be lavin' it
to-morrow, and no later. The next time ye find me at home, ye'll find
me in a place where I can keep a butler and have him do his work.'
"Wid that he took the lantern and started for the cellar himself.
Ye'll guess that I was in the dining-room as soon as Jack and heard
all this, and I was back in the cellar, too, before MacCarthy got
there. I was sittin' on a cask of port, when he came in and saw me be
the light of the lantern. I was sittin' there, wid a spiggot over me
shoulder. 'Are ye there?' says MacCarthy. 'Who are ye, anyway, and
what are ye doin' there?'
[Illustration: "I WAS SITTIN' THERE, WID A SPIGGOT OVER ME SHOULDER."]
"'Sure, your honor,' says I, 'a'n't we goin' to move to-morrow, and
it's not the likes of a kind man like you that would be wishin' to
lave poor little Naggeneen behind.'
"'Is that the way of it?' says MacCarthy. 'Well, if you're agoin' to
move wid us, I see no use in movin' at all. If I'm to have you in me
cellar, wherever it is, it may as well be at Ballinacarthy as
anywhere.'
"And from that day till the day of his death me and old MacCarthy was
the best of friends. And he always brought all his wine from the
cellar himself."
"And what has all that to do wid us?" said the King.
"What has it to do wid ye?" said Naggeneen. "It has nothin' to do wid
ye, unless ye want to make it, and never a care I care whether ye do
or not. But it has a good deal to do wid me. It shows, doesn't it,
that I was ready to go wid old MacCarthy, and him runnin' away from
me; and just so I'm ready to go wid the Sullivans, now that they're
runnin' away from me. I've given ye a good hint. Ye can do as ye
plase."
"It's glad I'ld be," said the Queen, "if we could be rid of the
Sullivans and Naggeneen both at once, but I dunno what we'll do at all
if the O'Briens go away."
"I'm not over-fond of Naggeneen meself," said the King, "but it's a
sharp bit of a boy he is, and I'm thinkin' he may not be far from
right this time. It might be that a new counthry would be as good for
us as for the O'Briens or the Sullivans, and, anyway, we'ld still be
near to them."
"Do ye mean," the Queen said, "that ye think we might all go to the
States along wid the O'Briens and the Sullivans and Naggeneen?"
"If Naggeneen goes," the King replied, "he'll go along wid us; we'll
not go wid him; but it was just that same that I was thinkin'. And yet
we couldn't do a thing like that widout the lave of the King of All
Ireland."
When the King spoke of the King of All Ireland, of course he meant the
King of all the fairies in Ireland. He was himself only the King of
this rath. Of course you know that the people of Ireland have no kings
of their own any more.
"Naggeneen, me boy," said the King, "just take your fut in your hand
and go to the King of All Ireland. Give him me compliments and ask him
would he think there was anything against the whole of us goin' to the
States."
"Is it me that would be runnin' arrants to the King of All Ireland,"
Naggeneen answered: "me, that don't belong to your thribe at all, and
forty lazy spalpeens around here wearin' their legs off wid dancin' or
rustin' them off wid doin' nothin' at all?"
"It's thrue you don't belong to me thribe," said the King, "and glad I
am of that same. But while ye stay in me rath ye'll do what I bid ye.
Why would I kape a dog and bark meself? Go on, now, and do what I tell
ye, or ye know what I'll do to ye. Be off now!"
Naggeneen was off.
Now, while Naggeneen is gone with his message to the King of All
Ireland, I will just take a minute to say something that I have felt
like saying for quite a little while. He will not be gone much more
than a minute. What I have to say is this: Nearly all the people in
this story, mortals and fairies, too, had the way of speaking that
most Irish people have, which we call a brogue. Mrs. O'Brien had only
a little of it--just the bit of a soft brogue that comes from Dublin,
where she had lived for a long time. The most of the others had a good
deal more. But as I go on with the story from here, I see no use in
trying to write the brogue. It is hard to spell and confusing to read.
If you do not know what a good Irish brogue is, you would never learn
from any attempt of mine to spell it out for you; and if you do know
what it is, you can put it in for yourself. I may have to try to write
a little of it now and then, for there is some Irish that does not
look like Irish when it is written in English, but I shall use as
little of it after this as I can. Naggeneen is back by this time.
Naggeneen sauntered into the hall where the King and the Queen and all
the company were waiting for him, with his hands in his pockets, quite
as if he had been out for a quiet stroll and had come back because he
was tired of it. "Well," said the King, "did you see the King of All
Ireland?"
"I saw him with my good-looking eyes," Naggeneen answered.
"And what did he say?"
"He said he'ld come here and talk to you himself, and, by the look of
him, I think it's a pleasant time he'll be giving you."
"Then why is he not here as soon as you?" the King asked.
"Oh, nothing would do for him," said Naggeneen, "but that he and his
men must come on horseback. They can come no faster that way, but they
think it's due to their dignity. They had to wait for the horses to be
ready, and so I beat them."
Naggeneen had scarcely said this when the door flew open at the end of
the hall, and, with a rush and a whirl, in came a great troupe of
fairies on horseback--the King of All Ireland and his men. They all
leaped down from their horses, and instantly every horse turned into a
green rush, such as grows beside the bogs. The King of All Ireland
walked quickly up to the King of the rath and stood before him, with
an awful frown on his face. The King of the rath was plainly nervous.
"Will you have a light for your pipe, Your Majesty?" he asked.
"Never mind my pipe now," said the King of All Ireland. "Tell me first
of all, who is this messenger that you sent to me?" The King of All
Ireland had only a little bit of brogue--the Dublin kind.
"Sure," said the King of the rath, "that's only poor Naggeneen."
"Only poor Naggeneen!" cried the King of All Ireland. "And what are
you doing with him? Do you see the red jacket he has on? Why doesn't
he wear a green jacket, like your people? You know what his red jacket
means as well as I. He belongs to the fairies who live by themselves,
not to those who live together honestly in a rath. Why do you have him
with your honest green jackets?"
"Sure, Your Majesty," said the King of the rath, "I thought it was no
harm. He said he was tired of being by himself, and you know how handy
he is with the fiddle or the pipes. If he'd been a fir darrig, that's
always playing tricks and making trouble everywhere, why, then, of
course--but he was only a poor cluricaun--"
"Yes," the King of All Ireland interrupted, "only a poor cluricaun,
that does nothing but rob gentlemen's wine cellars and keep himself so
drunk that he's of no use when he's wanted for any good. And hasn't he
made you as much trouble as any fir darrig could do?"
"I was a lepracaun, too, once, Your Majesty," Naggeneen said.
"A lepracaun, were you? What did you do then? And when was it and how
did it happen that a lazy lump like you was ever a lepracaun?"
"It was a long time ago," said Naggeneen, ready enough to talk about
anything to draw the King's thoughts away from the trouble that he had
made. "After old MacCarthy, of Ballinacarthy, died, those that came
after him did not keep up his cellar well, and I felt lonely and sad,
and I didn't care to drink any more--"
"Lonely and sad you must have been," said the King of All Ireland;
"but you did drink still, did you not, though you didn't care for it?"
"True for you, Your Majesty," said Naggeneen, "I did a little, just
for my health. But I was so lonely and so falling to pieces with
idleness--"
"Falling to pieces with idleness!" the King interrupted again. "If
idleness could make you fall to pieces, there wouldn't have been a
piece of you left big enough to make trouble in a fly's eye, these
last seven hundred years."
"As you say, Your Majesty," Naggeneen went on, "but, anyway, I was a
lepracaun, and I did what any other lepracaun does: I sat in the field
or under a tree and made brogues. But it was sorry work and people was
always trying to catch me, to make me show them the gold they thought
I had. And one time a great brute of a spalpeen did catch me, and he
nearly broke me in two with the squeeze he gave me, so that I wouldn't
get away till I'd showed him the gold. And I nearly had to show it to
him, but I made him look away for a second, and then of course I was
off. And after that my friend the King here let me come and live in
the rath, just for company--not that I belong to his little tribe at
all."
"And now you see," said the King of All Ireland, turning from
Naggeneen to the King of the rath, "what trouble comes to you from
taking those into your rath that have no right there. He's sending
people out of Ireland that might be of use to you and to all of us. He
wants to go with them, and that is no loss, but you want to go, too
and to take all your people. That might be a loss, though I don't know
that it would."
"We think it's best that we should go, Your Majesty," the King of the
rath answered, meekly, "if you see no reason why not."
"I see reasons enough why not," said the King of All Ireland. "You
don't know where you are going, nor what you'll find there. You don't
know how you're to live, nor whether it'll be any fit place to live.
You don't know whether the people there will help you or hinder you."
"Wherever the O'Briens go, they'll help us," the King of the rath
answered. "We don't like to have them leave us here."
"You've gone contrary to the law enough already," said the King of All
Ireland, "in taking in this fellow with the red coat. Now you may take
all the consequences of it and go where you like. I don't care where
you go and I think nobody cares, only I think it may be best for all
the Good People in Ireland to have you out of it. Mount your horses,"
he shouted to his men, "and we'll be off out of this!"
He took one of the little green rushes from the floor and sat astride
it, as a little boy rides on his father's cane. "Borram, borram,
borram!" he said, and instantly the rush was a beautiful white horse.
Every one of his men did the same. Each one took one of the rushes and
sat astride of it and said, "Borram, borram, borram!" and every one of
the rushes grew into a horse. There was a little whirring sound, like
that of a swarm of bees, and they were all gone.
Everybody in the rath was silent for a few minutes. The King and the
Queen looked at each other and were much troubled. Naggeneen, without
making a bit of noise, scuttled down to the farthest corner of the
hall. The others seemed not to know where to look or what to do or to
think. Then the King turned toward them and said; "It's all over; we
couldn't stay here now. Wherever has Naggeneen got to?"
The fairies who were nearest to Naggeneen hustled him forward and he
stood before the King again. "Naggeneen," said the King, "it's trouble
enough you've made for all of us, and it's ballyragging enough you and
all the rest of us have got for it, and we don't know, as His Majesty
said, what more is to come. So now do the only thing you was ever good
for and give us a tune out of the fiddle."
It was the only thing that Naggeneen was good for, and the only thing
that was not mischief that he liked to do. He took a fiddle from one
of the fairies who had been playing for the dancing before all the
confusion began. He held the fiddle under his chin for a moment, while
everybody waited, and then he began to play.
He played first some old tunes that every fairy in Ireland knows well.
But not every fairy in Ireland can play them as Naggeneen did. They
were tunes which everybody listening in that rath had known for
hundreds of years. There were wild and strange airs that made them
remember days when Ireland was a strange country, even to them; then
the music was full of wonder and mystery, like the spells of the old
Druids; then it was strong and free and fierce, and they thought of
Finn McCool and the Fenians, and the days when Erin had heroes to
guard her from her foes. The fiddle was telling them the story of
their own lives and of all that they had ever seen and known. Now it
was a strange music, which they could not understand--which the player
could understand as little as the rest--but it was soft and sweet, and
yet deep and bold, and the fairies trembled as they remembered the
holy Patrick and a mighty power in the worlds of the seen and of the
unseen. This passed away and the music came with the stir and the
swing of marching men, and the fairies were again in the days of King
Brian Boru, with Ireland free and brave and strong. It grew sad; it
gushed out like sobs from a broken heart; then it was quieter, but
still full of a softer sorrow; now it was merry and reckless. It made
the fairies remember all that they had ever seen in the lives of the
people whom they had known so long--the cruel hardship, war, sickness,
hunger, and then, besides, the faith, the kindliness, the
light-heartedness that had saved them through it all. There were tunes
that every man and woman in Ireland knows--tunes that you know--old
airs that every Irish fiddler or piper or singer learns from the older
ones, that the oldest ones of all learned, they say, from the fairies.
And under all the music, whether grave or gay, there went a strain of
grief, sometimes almost harsh and sometimes scarcely heard, and as the
fairies listened to it they grew pale at the thought that now they
were to go away from all that they had known, to find something which
they did not know. While they were thinking of this the music changed
again. It was a soft murmur, like the sound of the sea that is kept
forever in a sea-shell. Then it grew loud and rough, with the rush of
winds and the crash of waves. The fairies were filled with fright, and
before they knew that they were afraid, the music was singing a song
of hope, and then, all at once, it grew as merry as if there had never
been a sad thought in the world.
For a moment the fairies listened to it and all their feet began to
stir restlessly on the floor. One of the fairy men caught the hand of
a fairy girl--a fairy girl with cheeks like the tiny petals in the
heart of a rose, with a white gown like a mist, and hair like fine
sunbeams falling on the mist; he threw his arm about her waist, and
they danced away down the hall. In an instant all the rest were
dancing, too, alone, in pairs, and in rings. Naggeneen looked on and
laughed till he could scarcely play. All this time his music had moved
him less than anybody else who heard it. He did not feel what he had
made the others feel, but he knew how to pour it all out of his
fiddle.
The King made a sign for him to stop. All the dancers were still in an
instant. The lights in the hall went out. The next minute, if you had
been outside the rath and had laid your ear down on the turf which
covered it, you would have heard nothing more than you might hear
under the turf at any other time or in any other place.
[Illustration: ]
IV
THE CLEVERNESS OF MORTALS
If you live in the city of New York, or if you have ever been in the
city of New York for any long time, you know how disheartening, how
terrible, and how altogether unreasonable the climate can be at times.
But you also know how heavenly it can be on an autumn day, when the
sky and the air and the water are all in a good humor. To see and to
feel the best of it, you must be down in the Narrows, or somewhere
near there. The fierce heat has gone out of the air, but there is a
gentle warmth left in it. All the shores near you are turning from
green to brown and yellow, with here and there a dash of red. The sun
makes every sail in the bay a gleaming spot of white. Far up the bay
you see just an end of the city, with the tall buildings standing so
close that it looks like one great castle, built all over a hill that
slopes steeply down to the water on both sides. The Bridge looks like
a spider's web, spun across to the other shore. Beyond it all the
hills look purple, through the thin mist. If, instead of having seen
all this often, you saw it for the first time--if you were coming from
a far country, where you had always been poor--if you had toiled all
your life to pay your rent, never expecting to do more--then perhaps
you would look, more than anything else, at the giant woman standing
before you and holding her torch high into the sky to light the world.
It was on such a day as this that the O'Briens and the Sullivans saw
New York first. It was on the same day that the fairies who had left
the rath and followed them saw it too. The O'Briens and the Sullivans
had left their old home and gone to Queenstown, and the fairies had
followed them. Cork and Queenstown had rather alarmed the fairies.
They did not like the look of a city. It looked cold and stony and
uncomfortable. It did not look like a good place to dance out of doors
at night. They almost wished that they had stayed at home and let the
O'Briens and the Sullivans go where they liked without them. Some of
them even wanted to go back, but Naggeneen laughed at them, and
fairies can stand being laughed at even less than human beings. But
they all hoped that when the O'Briens and the Sullivans got wherever
they were going, it would not prove to be in a city.
Then the O'Briens and the Sullivans went on board a ship and were
stowed away in a place forward, with many other people, which the
fairies did not think roomy or airy or pleasant in any way. But they
were not obliged to stay in it. They found better places on the ship.
Nobody could see them, so they went where they liked. They went out on
the bow, where the lookout stood, and watched with him for sails and
for tiny puffs of smoke by day and for little glimmers of light by
night. They ran about the bridge and swarmed up the rigging. They even
danced on the deck, as if they were in a field at home; and the deck
was dewy at night, just like the field. They fluttered and whirled in
circles around the red light on the one side of the ship and the green
light on the other side, and they reminded them of the rubies and the
emeralds that had helped to light their own rath.
One day they saw swimming in the water beside the ship an ugly
creature, like a man, with a red nose, tangled green hair, green
teeth, and fingers with webs between them, like a duck's foot. There
was another creature, like a woman, very beautiful, but with green
hair, like the man. These were merrows--sea fairies.
"Where are you bound in that ship?" the merrows called to them.
[Illustration: "WHERE ARE YOU BOUND IN THAT SHIP?"]
"Where would we be bound at all," the King answered, "but to the
States, where the ship's bound?"
"And what are ye goin' there for?" the merrows asked again.
"Sure," said Naggeneen, "it's followin' the O'Briens and the Sullivans
we are, and it's the long way they're takin' us."
"Could you tell us what the States is like at all?" asked the King.
"Is it like Cork?"
"There's parts of them," said the man merrow, "that's more like Cork
than Cork itself, and there's other parts of them that's no more like
Cork than the sea here is like Cork Harbor."
"But are there no places there," the King asked again, "like the
country parts of Ireland, with the fields and the bogs and all?"
"I can't tell you that," the merrow answered. "We've never been far on
the land. Deep down under the sea it's the same way it is under the
sea about Ireland. There's the land at the bottom, with the sand all
fine and firm, like a floor, and there's the water above, like a green
sky, and there are the shells and the sea-flowers, and there are the
weeds that wave around you and over you, like red and green and purple
curtains to your house, and it's all as cool and as neat as any of the
sea-places around Ireland. And if you like to go up to get the warmth
of the sun or the light of the stars, there's white sand where you
can lie at your ease, and there's great rocks where you can sit and
look out over the sea and get the fresh breeze. And that's all we know
of it; we've not been away from the sea."
And after a week of voyaging through the sea--after going on and on
for so long and so far that both fairies and mortals began to think
that they must soon fall over the edge of the earth--the ship suddenly
stood up straight, instead of rolling and pitching about, and a little
later they saw the giant woman before them, holding up her torch, and
beyond her they saw the city. And then it was only a bit of a while
longer till they came close to the city.
"Look at it!" cried the King to all the fairies, who were crowded at
the bow; "it's like the country, after all! Look at all the grass and
the trees! But it has an iron chain all around it. I don't like the
look of that." All fairies hate iron. They more than hate it; they
simply cannot endure it. To touch any iron at all would hurt a fairy
more than it would hurt you to touch it when it was red hot.
"But it's only a small place, anyway," said Naggeneen. "Look at the
houses beyond there! There was nothing like them in Cork! And do you
mind them strings of coaches, running along up in the air?"
"I was takin' note of them," said the King; "sure it's the strange
country!"