e
hills look purple, through the thin mist. If, instead of having seen
all this often, you saw it for the first time--if you were coming from
a far country, where you had always been poor--if you had toiled all
your life to pay your rent, never expecting to do more--then perhaps
you would look, more than anything else, at the giant woman standing
before you and holding her torch high into the sky to light the world.

It was on such a day as this that the O'Briens and the Sullivans saw
New York first. It was on the same day that the fairies who had left
the rath and followed them saw it too. The O'Briens and the Sullivans
had left their old home and gone to Queenstown, and the fairies had
followed them. Cork and Queenstown had rather alarmed the fairies.
They did not like the look of a city. It looked cold and stony and
uncomfortable. It did not look like a good place to dance out of doors
at night. They almost wished that they had stayed at home and let the
O'Briens and the Sullivans go where they liked without them. Some of
them even wanted to go back, but Naggeneen laughed at them, and
fairies can stand being laughed at even less than human beings. But
they all hoped that when the O'Briens and the Sullivans got wherever
they were going, it would not prove to be in a city.

Then the O'Briens and the Sullivans went on board a ship and were
stowed away in a place forward, with many other people, which the
fairies did not think roomy or airy or pleasant in any way. But they
were not obliged to stay in it. They found better places on the ship.
Nobody could see them, so they went where they liked. They went out on
the bow, where the lookout stood, and watched with him for sails and
for tiny puffs of smoke by day and for little glimmers of light by
night. They ran about the bridge and swarmed up the rigging. They even
danced on the deck, as if they were in a field at home; and the deck
was dewy at night, just like the field. They fluttered and whirled in
circles around the red light on the one side of the ship and the green
light on the other side, and they reminded them of the rubies and the
emeralds that had helped to light their own rath.

One day they saw swimming in the water beside the ship an ugly
creature, like a man, with a red nose, tangled green hair, green
teeth, and fingers with webs between them, like a duck's foot. There
was another creature, like a woman, very beautiful, but with green
hair, like the man.