Perhaps he may have found and gathered, ragamuffin though he be, the
Lily of High Truth, the Rose of Far-sought Beauty, for whose lack so
many of the writers of Ireland, whether famous or forgotten, have been
futile as the blown froth upon the shore.




REGINA, REGINA PIGMEORUM, VENI


One night a middle-aged man, who had lived all his life far from the
noise of cab-wheels, a young girl, a relation of his, who was reported
to be enough of a seer to catch a glimpse of unaccountable lights
moving over the fields among the cattle, and myself, were walking along
a far western sandy shore. We talked of the Forgetful People as the
faery people are sometimes called, and came in the midst of our talk to
a notable haunt of theirs, a shallow cave amidst black rocks, with its
reflection under it in the wet sea sand. I asked the young girl if she
could see anything, for I had quite a number of things to ask the
Forgetful People. She stood still for a few minutes, and I saw that she
was passing into a kind of waking trance, in which the cold sea breeze
no longer troubled her, nor the dull boom of the sea distracted her
attention. I then called aloud the names of the great faeries, and in a
moment or two she said that she could hear music far inside the rocks,
and then a sound of confused talking, and of people stamping their feet
as if to applaud some unseen performer. Up to this my other friend had
been walking to and fro some yards off, but now he passed close to us,
and as he did so said suddenly that we were going to be interrupted,
for he heard the laughter of children somewhere beyond the rocks. We