"I hope there's something to eat there," said I.
"I tell you there is something there, alive," said my wife with her eyes as large as saucers; "it's making an awful sound like snoring."
"That's the fairies, ma'am," said Slipper with complete certainty; "sure I known them that seen fairies in that island as thick as the grass, and every one o' them with little caps on them."
Philippa's wide gaze wandered to Slipper's hideous pug face and back to me.
"It was not a human being, Sinclair!" she said combatively, though I had not uttered a word.
Maria had already, after the manner of dogs, leaped, dripping, into the boat: I prepared to follow her example.
"Major," said Slipper, in a tragic whisper, "there was a man was a night on that island one time, watching duck, and Thim People cot him, and dhragged him through Hell and through Death, and threw him in the tide——"
"Shove off the boat," I said, too hungry for argument.
Slipper obeyed, throwing his knee over the gunwale as he did so, and tumbling into the bow; we could have done without him very comfortably, but his devotion was touching.
Holy Island was perhaps a hundred yards long, and about half as many broad; it was covered with trees and a dense growth of rhododendrons; somewhere in the jungle was a ruined fragment of a chapel, smothered in ivy and briars, and in a little glade in the heart of the island there was a holy well. We landed, and it was obviously a sore humiliation to Philippa that not a sound was to be heard in the spell-bound silence of the island, save the cough of a heron on a tree-top.