Tongue of spice and salt and wine and honey,
Magic, mystic, sweet, intemperate tongue!
Flower of lavish love and lyric fury,
Mixed on lips forever rash and young,
Wildly droll and quaintly tender;--

Hark, the hidden melodies of Elfland
In the under, in the over tone;
Clear faint wailing of the far-heard banshee,
Out of lands where never the sun shone,
Calling doom on chieftains dying....




PIPER TIM

I


When Moira O'Donnell was born, Timothy Moran was thirty-three years old, a
faëry number, as he often told himself afterward. When he was forty and
she was seven, another mystic number, he dedicated his life to her and she
gave him back his lost kingdom of enchantment. It was on the evening of
her seventh birthday that she led him to the Land of Heart's Desire he
thought he had left forever in green and desolate Donegal, and her
birthday fell on the seventh of October, and October is the month when the
little people are busiest. He never forgot what she did for him that
evening, although her part in it was so brief.