“I’ll take you along the back road and up Witch Hill,” she said. “It has the name of names for it, and how that ever happened I can’t imagine. The loveliest places usually have the worst names. There’s Hog Hill Road. It’s a dream of loveliness, and how any one ever had the heart to turn hogs loose on it! Of course they say it’s the hog back shape of the hill that gave it its name, but when I ride there, even on the heavenliest day, I fancy I hear gruntings. Now Witch Road is all magic. It lives up to its name. There’s a tradition that once upon a time an old witch lived in a little hut that’s crumbling away beside the road at the hilltop. I’ve an idea she threw a spell over the whole hill and it lingers. There’s Ezra Watts!”
“Good morning, Mr. Watts!”
A man, standing in the doorway of a dilapidated little house over whose forlornness a willow wept miserably, muttered an almost inaudible salutation. His weak, evil face did not lighten even for the Smiling Lady. Slouching, ragged, dirty, he stood in the sunshine like a blot on the summer day, and stared out at the riders sullenly from under a matted thatch of thick, straggling, black hair.
“Pleasant, friendly chap!” Archibald commented lightly.
The Smiling Lady sighed.
And then they forgot him, for they turned from the sunshiny back road, into an enchanted wood where a wide mossy trail wound gently, gently upward through shifting light and shade. Moist, pungent wood scents haunted the air. The gurgle of running water, insistent, mirthful, told that hidden among the ferns and mosses a brook followed the road companionably.
“It comes out into the open farther up,” the girl said as she listened, “but down here it hides just for the fun of the thing.”
“A naiad’s trick,” Archibald suggested. “Probably there are fauns abroad.”
“No; only the Little People,” she corrected. “I’m all for Irish fairies myself. The poets and the artists and the mythology classes have taken the heart out of the Greek ideas, but the Celts—Oh, well, we’ve had our own troubles with poets, but they haven’t killed and stuffed all our gods and heroes and Little People yet. Father and I used to spend months in Ireland every year and I’ve heard such tales there—Oh, such tales! I’d always the hope of seeing the Little People myself or of stepping off into the Green World, and finding my way to Tir ’nan Og. Things like that seem so possible in Ireland, and some way or other Witch Mill is the same for me. It’s full of shapes I can’t quite see and voices I can’t quite hear, and I look and listen and wait. I’m always excited up here. The wonderful thing might happen any moment. There are places like that, you know!”
She was talking lightly but there were dreams in her eyes.