at evening by
the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint
mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily
discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures,
the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or
from the Heart Lake in the south.

THE UNTIRING ONES

It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any
unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like,
and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this
entanglement of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and
deepens the furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as
good heart as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them.
But until that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-
half of their fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor can
the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal
peasants remember this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of
the heaviness of the fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they
tell stories about it that it may not be forgotten. A short while ago,
they say, two faeries, little creatures, one like a young man, one like
a young woman, came to a farmer's house, and spent the night sweeping
the hearth and setting all tidy. The next night they came again, and
while the farmer was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one
room, and having arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeur
it seems, they began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and days
went by, and all the country-side came to look at them, but still their
feet never tired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while;
and after three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, and
went and told them that the priest was coming. The little creatures
when they heard this went back to their own country, and there their
joy shall last as long as the points of the rushes are brown, the
people say, and that is until God shall burn up the world with a kiss.

But it is not merely faeries who know untiring days, for there have
been men and women who, falling under their enchantment, have attained,
perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more than
faery abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have
gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty,
blown hither and thither by th