A little Margaret knelt on the cold stone floor at church and stared at the pictured saints or heard the budding branches rustle in the orchard outside. Another Margaret, a little taller, begged for a new sheet of ballads every time her father went to the fair.—There were the long flimsy sheets, with closely printed verses. These you must adapt to familiar tunes. This Margaret, then, swept the hearth and stacked the turf and sang from her bench in the chimney-corner. Sometimes it was something about 'the little old red coat me father wore,' which was 'All buttons, buttons, buttons, buttons; all buttons down before'; or another beginning,—
| 'O, dear, what can the matter be? |
| Johnnie's so long at the fair! |
| He promised to buy me a knot of blue ribbon |
| To tie up my bonny brown hair.' |
Then there was a picture of the time the fairies actually bewitched the churn, and, labor as you might, no butter would form, not the least tiny speck. Margaret and her mother took the churn apart and examined every part of it. Nothing out of the way. '’Tis the fairies is in it,' her mother said. 'All Souls' Day a-Friday. Put out a saucer of cream the night for the little people, let you.' A well-grown girl in a blue cotton frock, the long braids of her black hair whipping about her in the windy evening, set out the cream on the stone flags before the low doorway, wasting no time in getting in again. The next day, how the butter 'came'! Hardly started they were, when they could feel it forming. When Margaret washed the dasher, she 'kept an eye out' for the dark corners of the room, for the air seemed thronged and murmurous.
After this picture, came always the same tall girl still in the same blue frock, this time with a shawl on her head. She brought in potatoes from the sheltered heaps that wintered out in the open. From one pailful she picked out a little flat stone, rectangular and smoother and more evenly proportioned than any stone she had ever seen.
'What a funny stone!' she said to her mother.
Her mother left carding her wool to look. 'You may well say so. ’Tis one of the fairies' tables. Look close and you'll be turning up their little chairs as well.'
It was as her mother said. Margaret found four smaller stones of like appearance, which one might well imagine to be stools for tiny dolls.
'Shall I be giving them to little Bee for playthings?'
'You will not. You'll be putting them outside. In the morning, though you may be searching the countryside, no trace of them will you find, for the fairies will be taking them again.'