Some nights the moon rode high and the air was clear and those were not
the times for words--only for sitting quite still and playing every air in
all the world on the pipes. Moira lay beside him, her strange, wide eyes
fixed intently on the road and the shadows until she peopled them almost
visibly to the musician with the folk of his melodies--with Angus, the
beautiful and strong, with Maive, the sad, the happy, with Congal of the
frightful Vision of War, and Mananan, strange wanderer on these mountain
tops.

Sometimes it rained, the long steady downpour of summer nights, and they
sat on the steps of Michael O'Donnell's little cabin, Timothy's pipes
sounding sweet and shrill against the deep note of the rushing rain. This
was the time of the wildest stories, when sheltering walls were close
about them; of newly wed wives carried off by the fairies to live happy
always, always without a moment of pain, and then to perish utterly on the
Day of Judgment, like a last year's butterfly, for souls cannot live
without sorrow; of newly born babes whose souls were carried away by the
sidhe because a cock was not killed on the night of their birth, and of
the mystic meaning of vicarious sacrifice; of people who had lain down to
sleep unaware in a fairy ring and were foolish ever afterward--that is, as
people say, foolish, but really wise, for they saw how things are; of
homes built unknowingly across a fairy path where the sidhe take their
journeys, and how ill luck followed the inhabitants until they moved, and
of the strange penalties for living out of harmony with the little-known
currents of the soul's life; of how blind men see more than others; of how
a fool is one whose mind is so cleared of all futile commonplace traffic
that it reflects untroubled and serene the stars and their courses; of how
wisdom is folly, and life, death. All these things and many more did
Timothy say in words and play in music on his pipes, and to all of them