Part I - Page 2

I could hear through the
broken panes that a number of them still used the Gaelic, though it
seems to be falling out of use among the younger people of this
village.

The old woman of the house had promised to get me a teacher of the
language, and after a while I heard a shuffling on the stairs, and
the old dark man I had spoken to in the morning groped his way into
the room.

I brought him over to the fire, and we talked for many hours. He
told me that he had known Petrie and Sir William Wilde, and many
living antiquarians, and had taught Irish to Dr. Finck and Dr.
Pedersen, and given stories to Mr. Curtin of America. A little after
middle age he had fallen over a cliff, and since then he had had
little eyesight, and a trembling of his hands and head.

As we talked he sat huddled together over the fire, shaking and
blind, yet his face was indescribably pliant, lighting up with an
ecstasy of humour when he told me anything that had a point of wit
or malice, and growing sombre and desolate again when he spoke of
religion or the fairies.

He had great confidence in his own powers and talent, and in the
superiority of his stories over all other stories in the world. When
we were speaking of Mr. Curtin, he told me that this gentleman had
brought out a volume of his Aran stories in America, and made five
hundred pounds by the sale of them.

'And what do you think he did then?' he continued; 'he wrote a book
of his own stories after making that lot of money with mine. And he
brought them out, and the divil a half-penny did he get for them.
Would you believe that?'

Afterwards he told me how one of his children had been taken by the
fairies.

One day a neighbor was passing, and she said, when she saw it on the
road, 'That's a fine child.'

Its mother tried to say 'God bless it,' but something choked the
words in her throat.

A while later they found a wound on its neck, and for three nights
the house was filled with noises.

'I never wear a shirt at night,' he said, 'but I got up out of my
bed, all naked as I was, when I heard the noises in the house, and
lighted a light, but there was nothing in it.'

Then a dummy came and made signs of hammering nails in a coffin. The
next day the seed potatoes were full of blood, and the child told
his mother that he was going to America.

That night it died, and 'Believe me,' said the old man, 'the fairies
were in it.'

When he went away, a little bare-footed girl was sent up with turf
and the bellows to make a fire that would last for the evening.

She was shy, yet eager to talk, and told me that she had good spoken
Irish, and was learning to read it in the school, and that she had