reasonable souls; or throw herrings' heads and dead dog-fish, or
any other refuse, into the water; or in any way make a mess upon
the clean shore--there the water-babies will not come, sometimes
not for hundreds of years (for they cannot abide anything smelly or
foul), but leave the sea-anemones and the crabs to clear away
everything, till the good tidy sea has covered up all the dirt in
soft mud and clean sand, where the water-babies can plant live
cockles and whelks and razor-shells and sea-cucumbers and golden-
combs, and make a pretty live garden again, after man's dirt is
cleared away. And that, I suppose, is the reason why there are no
water-babies at any watering-place which I have ever seen.

And where is the home of the water-babies? In St. Brandan's fairy
isle.

Did you never hear of the blessed St. Brandan, how he preached to
the wild Irish on the wild, wild Kerry coast, he and five other
hermits, till they were weary and longed to rest? For the wild
Irish would not listen to them, or come to confession and to mass,
but liked better to brew potheen, and dance the pater o'pee, and
knock each other over the head with shillelaghs, and shoot each
other from behind turf-dykes, and steal each other's cattle, and
burn each other's homes; till St. Brandan and his friends were
weary of them, for they would not learn to be peaceable Christians
at all.

So St. Brandan went out to the point of Old Dunmore, and looked
over the tide-way roaring round the Blasquets, at the end of all
the world, and away into the ocean, and sighed--"Ah that I had
wings as a dove!" And far away, before the setting sun, he saw a