her dress touched him. "He fell down, and was dead three days." But
this is merely the small gossip of faerydom--the little stitches that
join this world and the other.

One night as I sat eating Mrs. H-----'s soda-bread, her husband told
me a longish story, much the best of all I heard in Rosses. Many a poor
man from Fin M'Cool to our own days has had some such adventure to tell
of, for those creatures, the "good people," love to repeat themselves.
At any rate the story-tellers do. "In the times when we used to travel
by the canal," he said, "I was coming down from Dublin. When we came to
Mullingar the canal ended, and I began to walk, and stiff and fatigued
I was after the slowness. I had some friends with me, and now and then
we walked, now and then we rode in a cart. So on till we saw some girls
milking cows, and stopped to joke with them. After a while we asked
them for a drink of milk. 'We have nothing to put it in here,' they
said, 'but come to the house with us.' We went home with them, and sat
round the fire talking. After a while the others went, and left me,
loath to stir from the good fire. I asked the girls for something to
eat. There was a pot on the fire, and they took the meat out and put it
on a plate, and told me to eat only the meat that came off the head.
When I had eaten, the girls went out, and I did not see them again. It
grew darker and darker, and there I still sat, loath as ever to leave
the good fire, and after a while two men came in, carrying between them
a corpse. When I saw them, coming I hid behind the door. Says one to
the other, putting the corpse on the spit, 'Who'll turn the spit? Says
the other, 'Michael H-----, come out of that and turn the meat.' I came
out all of a tremble, and began turning the spit. 'Michael H------,'
says the one who spoke first, 'if you let it burn we'll have to put you
on the spit instead'; and on that they went out. I sat there trembling
and turning the corpse till towards midnight. The men came again, and