The Friends of the People of Faery

Those that see the people of faery most often, and so have the most of
their wisdom, are often very poor, but often, too, they are thought to
have a strength beyond that of man, as though one came, when one has
passed the threshold of trance, to those sweet waters where Maeldun saw
the dishevelled eagles bathe and become young again.

There was an old Martin Roland, who lived near a bog a little out of
Gort, who saw them often from his young days, and always towards the
end of his life, though I would hardly call him their friend. He told
me a few months before his death that "they" would not let him sleep at
night with crying things at him in Irish, and with playing their pipes.
He had asked a friend of his what he should do, and the friend had told
him to buy a flute, and play on it when they began to shout or to play
on their pipes, and maybe they would give up annoying him; and he did,
and they always went out into the field when he began to play. He
showed me the pipe, and blew through it, and made a noise, but he did
not know how to play; and then he showed me where he had pulled his
chimney down, because one of them used to sit up on it and play on the
pipes. A friend of his and mine went to see him a little time ago, for
she heard that "three of them" had told him he was to die. He said they
had gone away after warning him, and that the children (children they
had "taken," I suppose) who used to come with them, and play about the
house with them, had "gone to some other place," because "they found
the house too cold for them, maybe"; and he died a week after he had
said these things.

His neighbours were not certain that he really saw anything in his old
age, but they were all certain that he saw things when he was a young
man. His brother said, "Old he is, and it's all in his brain the things
he sees. If he was a young man we might believe in him." But he was
improvident, and never got on with his brothers. A neighbour said, "The
poor man, they say they are mostly in his head now, but sure he was a
fine fresh man twenty years ago the night he saw them linked in two
lots, like young slips of girls walking together. It was the night they
took away Fallon's little girl." And she told how Fallon's little girl
had met a woman "with red hair that was as bright as silver," who took
her away. Another neighbour, who was herself "clouted over the ear" by
one of them for going into a fort where they were, said, "I believe
it's mostly in his head they are; and when he stood in the door last
night I said, 'The wind does be always in my ears, and the sound of it
never stops,' to make him think it was the same with him; but he