issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one of
them raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round,
and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home to
find it was but faery glamour. To this hour on the border of the lake
is shown a half-dug trench--the signet of their impiety. A little way
from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of faery
kidnapping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, who
sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as
though she remembered the dancing of her youth.

A young man going at nightfall to the house of his just married bride,
met in the way a jolly company, and with them his bride. They were
faeries, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band. To
him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when she
saw her old love, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest be should
eat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into that
bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards with
three of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until he
saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly
all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to the
house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the
keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic
poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my
white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.

Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the
living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John
Kirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[FN#8] are a family much rumoured
of in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and