IN THE FAIRY RATH
"Oh, Mary Ellen, it's the fairy rath," said Kathleen under her breath,
and she clasped her father's hand more tightly.
Grandmother Barry, who talked often in Gaelic about the fairies with
Great-grandmother Connell, had told the children many times not to play
too near the fairy rath.
"There be many such mounds scattered over the hills and glens of ould
Ireland," she said. "The good people live in them and may do harm to
childer that make too bold with their haunts."
"They must be bad people if they would do harm to little Mary Ellen,"
Kathleen replied.
"Hush, child!" her grandmother reproved her. "They are like all men and
women, liker to _do_ good if they be called good."
Now, as they drew near the fairy rath, Kathleen tiptoed over the rocky
path, thinking every moment to see a fairy slip behind a pebble or a
blade of grass. She felt sure that when they stepped within the rocky
ring, a door would open in the grassy mound and show to her eager eyes
long rooms glittering with jewelled walls, leading one after another
into the depths of the earth.
What was her surprise then, when they entered the enclosure, to find,
not a magic door leading to fairyland but a single tiny room dug out of
the mound, sheltered from wind and rain by sods and stones, with just
room enough for a man to work at his bench, and no more.
Her father pointed out to the child's disappointed eyes a leather pouch
lying among the tools on the work-bench.
"That is the only purse I've got, Kathleen," he said, "and my fingers
have never seen the magic day when they could fill it with silver."
Poor Mary Ellen's blind eyes could see nothing of the shoemaker's
bench and the empty purse, but her heart felt all the loving thought
that moved her sister to ask, "Then why did you not leave the dish of
stirabout under the hawthorn bush? The little elf shoemaker sits there
every night mending his shoe, with his purse of gold beside him. Belike
you might snatch it yourself."
"Oh, Kathleen, it's myself will be the only shoemaker in these parts,"
her father answered. "Put the foolish fancies out of your head now. No
good ever came of such thoughts."
It was not the first time he had told Kathleen to forget the fairy
lore, and he had often checked Grandmother Barry when her unruly tongue
touched upon the forbidden subject. "The childer's heads should not be
filled with such nonsense," he said.
But it was not easy to check Great-grandmother Connell. She had lived
ninety long years among a fairy-loving people, and liked to tell the
Gaelic stories of old Ireland over and over again.
She it was who believed that Ireland was first inhabited by a race of
giants. "They lived here with the birds and beasts before ever a man
rode through the green forests," she told Grandmother Barry.
"What became of them, then?" inquired her daughter.
"Sure, they turned themselves into the wee folk when men came here from
over the seas, and they live under the rocks and trees and in the fairy
mounds."
"True it is," agreed Grandmother Barry, and she told Kathleen what
the great-grandmother had been saying in Gaelic about the giants and
fairies.
That was how Kathleen came to know so many of the tales of old Ireland,
and why she was always thinking of the wee folk.
"How can I put the thoughts out of my head?" she asked her father.
"Sure, the fairies are putting them in again all the time, with their
doings."
"What are they doing, the day, to make you think of them?" asked the
shoemaker.
"There's the ring of green grass beyond the hawthorn bush," she said
timidly. "Danny borrowed the plow from Farmer Flynn and plowed through
it over and over, but it came up again as round and green as ever. What
else could make it but the fairies with their dancing feet?"
The shoemaker shook his head hopelessly at the child's simple faith in
her old grandmother's stories. "It's not like you, with your sense and
handy ways about the house, to believe the fairy nonsense," he said.
"It must be because you have never learned the reading. After this you
must come up here when your work in the house is done, and I'll teach
you the words. If you don't believe it from my telling, you will from
the books, that there are no fairies in Ireland."
So it came about that on sunny afternoons through the winter two little
girls played on the top of the hill near a fairy rath in far Donegal,
in the north of Ireland. And often the shoemaker put his work down on
the bench and called the children to his side, where he told them true
stories of Irish history, and taught Kathleen to read from the pages of
an old Irish book.