e wanderer on these mountain
tops.

Sometimes it rained, the long steady downpour of summer nights, and they
sat on the steps of Michael O'Donnell's little cabin, Timothy's pipes
sounding sweet and shrill against the deep note of the rushing rain. This
was the time of the wildest stories, when sheltering walls were close
about them; of newly wed wives carried off by the fairies to live happy
always, always without a moment of pain, and then to perish utterly on the
Day of Judgment, like a last year's butterfly, for souls cannot live
without sorrow; of newly born babes whose souls were carried away by the
sidhe because a cock was not killed on the night of their birth, and of
the mystic meaning of vicarious sacrifice; of people who had lain down to
sleep unaware in a fairy ring and were foolish ever afterward--that is, as
people say, foolish, but really wise, for they saw how things are; of
homes built unknowingly across a fairy path where the sidhe take their
journeys, and how ill luck followed the inhabitants until they moved, and
of the strange penalties for living out of harmony with the little-known
currents of the soul's life; of how blind men see more than others; of how
a fool is one whose mind is so cleared of all futile commonplace traffic
that it reflects untroubled and serene the stars and their courses; of how
wisdom is folly, and life, death. All these things and many more did
Timothy say in words and play in music on his pipes, and to all of them
Moira gave her wide comprehending silence.

The best of all was on evenings when the stars came out first, and then as
the two sat watching them from the Round Stone they suddenly began to
pale, and the moon flashed into sight, rising swiftly over the mountain
Moira called "The Hill o' Delights," because it was from a wide, white
door in it that the rushing, light-footed little people came out every
evening when the twilight fell and the harsh endeavor of human life was
stilled to peace. There was neither talk nor music on those evenings, but
a silence full, like the lovely world about them, of unsaid, quivering
joy. Sometimes Timothy would turn after such a long time of deep and
cheering mutual knowledge of how fair were all things, and find Moira
slipped away from beside him; but so impalpable was the companionship she
gave him in the strange and sweet confusion of his thoughts that he did
not feel himself alone, though she might be already deep in the pines
be