go to bed.
He protested in vain, but indeed he was sleepy, and before he had
been carried half-way to the room the little soft face drooped with
half-closed eyes, while he drowsily rubbed his nose upon her shoulder
in an effort to keep awake. For a while she flitted about him, looking,
with her dark, shadowy hair flickering in the dim, silver light like
one of the beautiful heroines of Gaelic romance, or one of the twilight,
race of the Sidhe. Before going she sat by his bed and sang to him some
verses of a song, set to an old Celtic air whose low intonations were
full of a half-soundless mystery:

Over the hill-tops the gay lights are peeping;
Down in the vale where the dim fleeces stray
Ceases the smoke from the hamlet upcreeping:
Come, thou, my shepherd, and lead me away.

"Who's the shepherd?" said the boy, suddenly sitting up.

"Hush, alannah, I will tell you another time." She continued still more
softly:

Lord of the Wand, draw forth from the darkness,
Warp of the silver, and woof of the gold:
Leave the poor shade there bereft in its starkness:
Wrapped in the fleece we will enter the Fold.

There from the many-orbed heart where the Mother
Breathes forth the love on her darlings who roam,
We will send dreams to their land of another
Land of the Shining, their birthplace and home.

He would have asked a hundred questions, but she bent over him,
enveloping him with a sudden nightfall of hair, to give him his
good-night kiss, and departed. Immediately the boy sat up again; all his
sleepiness gone. The pure, gay, delicate spirit of childhood was darting
at ideas dimly perceived in the delicious moonlight of romance which
silvered his brain, where may airy and beautiful figures were moving:
The Fianna with floating locks chasing the flying deer; shapes more
solemn, vast, and misty, guarding the avenues to unspeakable secrets;
but he steadily pursued his idea.

"I guess he's one of the people who take you away to faeryland. Wonder
if he'd come to me? Think it's easy going away," with an intuitive
perception of the frailty of the link binding childhood to earth in its
dreams. (As a man Con will strive with passionate intensity to regain
that free, gay motion in the upper airs.) "Think I'll try if he'll
come," and he sang, with as near an approach as he could make to the
glimmering cadences of his sister's voice:

C