CHAPTER I

THE SHOEMAKER OF DONEGAL

“Tell me the story again, Kathleen.”

“I can’t tell it to you here, Mary Ellen,” whispered her sister. “Sure, he might be under the hedge this minute and hear me talking about him. Come to the top of the hill and I’ll tell you.”

Mary Ellen slipped her hand into Kathleen’s, and the two children stole softly away from the door-stone where they had been playing. Their bare feet made no sound on the green grass, and the old grandmother, who was spinning at the door of the cottage, did not even look up as they passed.

A thick fuchsia hedge bordered the plot of green grass that surrounded the cottage, shutting out the barren field behind the house. Slipping through the hedge, the little girls followed the narrow foot-path that led across the field to the top of the hill.

“I’m thinkin’ of a riddle Danny gave me the morn,” said Kathleen, as they ran along the path.

“Give it to me,” said Mary Ellen eagerly, and Kathleen laughed merrily as she repeated:

“From house to house it goes,

A wanderer small and slight;

And whether it rains or snows,

It sleeps outside in the night.”

“I’ll never guess it; tell it to me now, alanna,” begged her sister.

“If your blue eyes could see the little path under your feet you would see the answer,” replied Kathleen, as she led the blind child carefully over the steep pathway to the long stone slab where they loved to play. “We’ll sit here a bit,” she added, and drew Mary Ellen down beside her on the stone.

“Now tell me why you put the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush last night, and what became of it,” asked the child, who could wait no longer for the story.

“It was for the leprecaun,” Kathleen told her. “He is the fairy shoemaker, and he sits under the hedge all day tapping away on an old shoe. He wears a scarlet cap and a green coat, and there are two rows of buttons on his coat, with seven buttons in each row. He has a fairy purse which is filled with gold, and he puts it down beside him on the grass while he works; but he is always watching it. If I could just see him once and hold his eye for a minute, I could snatch the purse of gold and run away with it.”

“The old grandmother was spinning at the door”

The cottage is of stone, plastered and whitewashed [ Page 1]

“Did you ever see him?” whispered Mary Ellen.

“No,” replied her sister; “but I have heard him tapping on his shoe many a time. Once I saw his scarlet cap under the hedge, but when I knelt down to look closer he threw sand in my eyes, as he always does, and was gone in a winkin’.”

“Belike it was a humming-bird,” said Mary Ellen. “Danny says the hedge is full of their nests. But what would you do with the purse, Kathleen dear?”

Kathleen’s eyes filled with tears and she looked at her sister with a sad face. “Oh, darlin’, it’s for you,” she said, “to give you the sight in your pretty blue eyes. I’m thinkin’ of it all the time, and faith, some day I’ll find a way. That’s why I took the dish of oaten stirabout and put it under the hawthorn bush last night, and why I put the bowl of milk on the window ledge. It’s for the ‘good people,’ so that they’ll know we take thought of them.”

“Did the ‘good people’ drink the milk?” asked the blind child eagerly.

“No, Mary Ellen,” said her sister, “but, listen! The stirabout was gone this morning, dish and all. The leprecaun must have taken it. I shall watch for him the night, and if I do catch the old shoemaker’s eye, I’ll hold it till he gives me his purse.”

“I’m thinkin’ that no one has ever held it yet," said Mary Ellen, snuggling against Kathleen’s shoulder, as if there might be some danger in holding a fairy dwarf spellbound with the look of one’s eye.

Kathleen lowered her voice and asked mysteriously, “Whist, Mary Ellen, do you mind old Granny Connor?”

“She that lives beyond the bog?” questioned Mary Ellen.

“Yes,” said Kathleen.

“I mind that she lives all alone, and that the father tells us not to go near her,” answered her sister. “She’s too friendly with the fairies.”

“Last night,” said Kathleen, taking her sister’s hand, and looking into her blue eyes while her own grew big and dark, “when I was driving the little cow home across the bog, who should I meet under the old oak tree but Granny Connor herself.

“I picked a bit of shamrock and held it tight in my hand, but she stopped me and made me talk to her, and she told me that it is our own father, himself, that has a purse from the leprecaun.”

“I’ll not believe it,” said her sister quickly. “If he had, he’d not be making shoes all day by himself.”

But Kathleen shook her head. “Granny Connor told me,” she confided, “that he has made a bargain with the fairy dwarf, and must make shoes all day long, or go wandering over the mountains a-tinkerin’.”

“What’s that you’re saying, Kathleen?” a voice behind them asked suddenly, and the children jumped up in surprise.

A man with a leather apron tied round his waist was standing beside the stone slab. It was hard to tell where he had come from so quickly, for there had been no sign of any one near when Kathleen climbed to the top of the hill.

“It is the father himself,” said Mary Ellen.

The shoemaker seated himself on the big stone and drew his little daughters down beside him; but it was such an unusual thing for him to spare any time from his work that they sat awkwardly within the shelter of his arms, waiting for him to speak.

Kathleen wondered how much of their talk he had heard, and whether he would scold her for listening to old Granny Connor, and repeating the tales to her little sister. She hung her head in silence, and Mary Ellen felt as if the sunshine had been darkened by a cloud; but the father’s arms were around both little girls to hold them, although he did not speak for some time.

“So you have been listening to old Granny Connor,” he said at last.

Kathleen stole a look into his face, which always had a kindly smile for everyone. “I did not mean any wrong,” she said timidly. “I was only wanting to find some way to help Mary Ellen.”

“What would you be doing for Mary Ellen?” he asked.

“I’d like to find some way to get money so that she might go to Dublin and have a doctor cure her eyes,” said the child simply.

“And so you put a dish of stirabout where the little old shoemaker might see it?” asked her father.

Both the children nodded their heads.

“How did you find out about the fairy dwarf?”

“Great-grandmother Connell and Grandmother Barry talk about him in Gaelic. Sometimes Grandmother Barry tells us what they are saying,” answered Kathleen. “And last night I asked old Granny Connor to tell me more.”

“What did she say?” asked her father.

“She said that people call you the leprecaun of Donegal, because of the two rows of buttons in sevens on your green frieze coat.”

The shoemaker laughed. “And where do they think I keep my money?” he asked.

“They say you have it hidden in a purse that can never grow empty, and that you keep it in the place where you mend your shoes,” the child replied, looking away from her father and off across the bog to the purple mountains. “And no one knows where it is that you have your work-bench,” she added with a sigh.

“Look at me, Kathleen,” said her father.

The child turned her gray eyes up to his, gray and honest like her own.

“Did you think when you put the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush last night, that you would see me take it up?”

“Oh, no, no!” cried Kathleen. “Sure, I thought it would be the tiny man, himself, who would find it.”

“But it was myself who found it and took it away, when you were sound asleep in your bed,” said her father.

Kathleen jumped up in surprise, but Mary Ellen nodded her curly head, as if she knew all the time that it was not the fairy.

“I saw Granny Connor’s red cloak bobbing across the bog last night, as I stood at my bench mending an old shoe,” her father continued, “and I watched you stop under the oak tree to talk with her. When I found the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush I knew it was time for me to put an end to these foolish notions about the good people, and tell you the true words about Ireland’s brave men and women. You should be learning about Brian Boru, who drove the Danes out of Ireland, and Daniel O’Connell, the greatest orator ever born on Irish soil. Those are the men for you to be thinking of, instead of the leprecaun.”

Kathleen looked at him earnestly. “It’s not one word I’m believin’ of all they say about you, Father,” she said.

“It is what they say about the fairy people that’s not for you to believe,” he answered, and rising from the stone slab, he took a hand of each of the children and led them across the top of the hill to a grassy mound which was encircled by a ring of jagged rocks.