The Untiring Ones - Page 2

would live as long as it
remained unconsumed. The mother buried the log, and the child grew up,
became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries, who came to her
at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince died, and another
prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful peasant girl in his
turn; and after another seven hundred years he died also, and another
prince and another husband came in his stead, and so on until she had
had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of the parish called
upon her, and told her that she was a scandal to the whole
neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was very
sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him about
the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and then
they burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and
everybody was pleased. Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[FN#9] who
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted,
until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo.

[FN#9] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would
mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a
very famous person, perhaps the mother of the Gods herself. A friend of
mine found her, as he thinks frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake
on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or the
storyteller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough
Leaths.

The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log
and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled
hate and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with "yes" and
"no," or entangled their feet with the sorry net of "maybe" and
"perhaps." The great winds came and took them up into themselves.