ever good
for and give us a tune out of the fiddle."

It was the only thing that Naggeneen was good for, and the only thing
that was not mischief that he liked to do. He took a fiddle from one
of the fairies who had been playing for the dancing before all the
confusion began. He held the fiddle under his chin for a moment, while
everybody waited, and then he began to play.

He played first some old tunes that every fairy in Ireland knows well.
But not every fairy in Ireland can play them as Naggeneen did. They
were tunes which everybody listening in that rath had known for
hundreds of years. There were wild and strange airs that made them
remember days when Ireland was a strange country, even to them; then
the music was full of wonder and mystery, like the spells of the old
Druids; then it was strong and free and fierce, and they thought of
Finn McCool and the Fenians, and the days when Erin had heroes to
guard her from her foes. The fiddle was telling them the story of
their own lives and of all that they had ever seen and known. Now it
was a strange music, which they could not understand--which the player
could understand as little as the rest--but it was soft and sweet, and
yet deep and bold, and the fairies trembled as they remembered the
holy Patrick and a mighty power in the worlds of the seen and of the
unseen. This passed away and the music came with the stir and the
swing of marching men, and the fairies were again in the days of King
Brian Boru, with Ireland free and brave and strong. It grew sad; it
gushed out like sobs from a broken heart; then it was quieter, but
still full of a softer sorrow; now it was merry and reckless. It made
the fairies remember all that they had ever seen in the lives of the
people whom they had known so long--the cruel hardship, war, sickness,
hunger, and then, besides, the faith, the kindliness, the
light-heartedness that had saved them through it all. There were tunes
that every man and woman in Ireland knows--tunes that you know--old
airs that every Irish fiddler or piper or singer learns from the older
ones, that the oldest ones of all learned, they say, from the fairies.
And under all the music, whether grave or gay, there went a strain of
grief, sometimes almost harsh and sometimes scarcely heard, and as the
fairies listened to it they grew pale at the thought that now they
were to go away from all that they had known, to find something which
they did not know. While they w