leared away. And that, I suppose, is the reason why
there are no water-babies at any watering-place which I have ever seen.

And where is the home of the water-babies? In St. Brandan's fairy isle.

Did you never hear of the blessed St. Brandan, how he preached to the
wild Irish on the wild, wild Kerry coast, he and five other hermits,
till they were weary and longed to rest? For the wild Irish would not
listen to them, or come to confession and to mass, but liked better to
brew potheen, and dance the pater o'pee, and knock each other over the
head with shillelaghs, and shoot each other from behind turf-dykes, and
steal each other's cattle, and burn each other's homes; till St. Brandan
and his friends were weary of them, for they would not learn to be
peaceable Christians at all.

So St. Brandan went out to the point of Old Dunmore, and looked over the
tide-way roaring round the Blasquets, at the end of all the world, and
away into the ocean, and sighed--"Ah that I had wings as a dove!" And
far away, before the setting sun, he saw a blue fairy sea, and golden
fairy islands, and he said, "Those are the islands of the blest." Then
he and his friends got into a hooker, and sailed away and away to the
westward, and were never heard of more. But the people who would not
hear him were changed into gorillas, and gorillas they are until this
day.

And when St. Brandan and the hermits came to that fairy isle they found
it overgrown with cedars and full of beautiful birds; and he sat down
under the cedars and preached to all the birds in the air. And they
liked his sermons so well that they told the fishes in the sea; and they
came, and St. Brandan preached to them; and the fishes told the
water-babies, who live in the caves under the isle; and they came up by
hundreds every Sunday, and St. Brandan got quite a neat little
Sunday-school. And there he taught the water-babies for a great many
hundred years, till his eyes grew too dim to see, and his beard grew so
long that he dared not walk for fear of treading on it, and then he
might have tumbled down. And at last he and the five hermits fell fast
asleep under the cedar-shades, and there they sleep unto this day. But
the fairies took to the water-babies, and taught them their lessons
themselves.

And some say that St. Brandan will awake and begin to teach the babies
once more: but some think that he will sleep on, for better for worse,
till the coming of the Cocqcigrues. But,