t Hallowe'en who should come by the same place
but Paddy More, and he stopped likewise to spy at the merrymaking.
He too was called in, but would not dance politely, added no
stories nor songs. The fairies clapped Paddy Beg's hump on his
back, and dismissed him under a double burden of discomfort.

A lad called Guleesh, listening outside a fort on Hallowe'en heard
the spirits speaking of the fatal illness of his betrothed, the
daughter of the King of France. They said that if Guleesh but knew
it, he might boil an herb that grew by his door and give it to the
princess and make her well. Joyfully Guleesh hastened home,
prepared the herb, and cured the royal girl.

Sometimes people did not have the luck to return, but were led away
to a realm of perpetual youth and music.

"_Father Hart._ What are you reading?

_Maire Bruin._ How a Princess Edane,
A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard
A voice singing on a May Eve like this,
And followed, half awake and half asleep,
Until she came into the land of faery,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue;
And she is still there, busied with a dance,
Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,
Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top."

YEATS: _Land of Heart's Desire._

If one returned, he found that the space which seemed to him but
one night, had been many years, and with the touch of earthly sod
the age he had postponed suddenly weighed him down. Ossian,
released from fairyland after three hundred years dalliance there,
rode back to his own country on horseback. He saw men imprisoned
under a block of marble and others trying to lift the stone. As he
leaned over to aid them the girth broke. With the touch of earth
"straightway the white horse fled away on his way home, and Ossian
became aged, decrepit, and blind."

No place as much as Ireland has kept the belief in all sorts of
supernatural spirits abroad among its people. From the time when on
the hill of Ward, near Tara, in pre-Christian days, the sacrifices
were burned and the Tuatha were thought to appear on Samhain, to as
late as 1910, testimony to actual appearances of the "little
people" is to be found.

"'Among the usually invisible races which I have seen in Ireland,
I distinguish five classes. There