ose stems glitter like silver pillars in
the shade? No--let us not disturb the silent people, now donning their
green array for nightly revelries. It is the "Isle of Fairies," and on
that knoll hath the fishermen often seen their Queen sitting on a
throne, surrounded by myriads of creatures no taller than harebells; one
splash of the oar--and all is vanished. There, it is said, lives among
the Folk of Peace, the fair child, who, many years ago, disappeared from
her parents' shieling at Inversnayde, and whom they vainly wept over as
dead. One evening she had floated away by herself in a small boat--while
her parents heard, without fear, the clank--duller and duller--of the
oars, no longer visible in the distant moonshine. In an hour the
returning vessel touched the beech--but no child was to be seen--and
they listened in vain for the music of the happy creature's songs. For
weeks the loch rolled and roared like the sea--nor was the body found
anywhere lying on the shore. Long, long afterwards, some little white
bones were interred in Christian burial, for the parents believed them
to be the remains of their child--all that had been left by the bill of
the raven. But not so thought many dwellers along the mountain-shores--for
had not her very voice been often heard by the shepherds, when the
unseen flight of Fairies sailed singing along up the solitary
Glenfalloch, away over the moors of Tynedrum, and down to the sweet
Dalmally, where the shadow of Cruachan darkens the old ruins of
melancholy Kilchurn. The lost child's parents died in their old age--but
she, 'tis said, is unchanged in shape and features--the same fair thing
she was the evening that she disappeared, only a shade of sadness is on
her pale face, as if she were pining for the sound of human voices, and
the gleam of the peat-fire of the shieling. Ever, when the Fairy-court
is seen for a moment beneath the glimpses of the moon, she is sitting by
the side of the gracious Queen. Words of might there are, that if
whispered at right season, would yet recall her from the shadowy world,
to which she has been spirited away; but small sentinels stand at their
stations all round the isle, and at nearing of human breath, a shrill
warning is given from sedge and water-lily, and like dewdrops melt away
the phantoms, while, mixed with peals of little laughter, overhead is
heard the winnowing of wings. For the hollow of the earth, and the
hollow of the air, is their Invisible