Annis, as the old woman was called, soon got to be very fond of the kind-hearted child; and to show how she appreciated her kindness she used to tell her stories about the Small People and the dear little brown, winking Piskeys, whom she seemed to know very intimately.
Bessie Jane was always interested in the Wee Folk, particularly the cliff ones and the sea-fairies, and expressed a great desire to see them.
Early one afternoon the child brought her old friend a basket of red currants and a cup of cream; and when she had set her gifts on the table, the Wise Woman went to her dresser and took from it a very small shrimping-net, or what looked like a shrimping-net.
‘It is a present I have made for you, dear little maid,’ she said.
‘What is it for?’ asked the child, when she had thanked Old Annis for her gift. ‘It looks like a shrimping-net, only its meshes are so fine—as fine as gossamer—that I am afraid it will not bear even the weight of a baby-shrimp!’
‘It is stronger than it looks,’ said the Wise Woman, with a curious look in her sloe-black eyes. ‘Its meshes are made out of Piskey-wool, which the Small People spun on their own little spinning-wheels, and which they gave me to mesh into a net. Its hoop and handle I cut from an ash-tree, where the Wee Folk gather to hold their gammets[1] in the moonshine.’
‘Did you really?’ cried little Bessie Jane. ‘How very interesting! I shall go down to Harlyn Bay at once and catch shrimps in the great pool under the shadow of the cliffs there.’
‘It will catch something nicer than shrimps, I hope,’ said Old Annis, following the child to the door. ‘Whatever you catch in it, my dear, don’t let it get out of the net until it promises to lend you its eyes and its ears for a night and a day.’
‘I don’t think I want anyone’s eyes and ears but my own,’ laughed the little maid as she went down Tamarisk Lane, which led to Harlyn Bay, swinging the shrimping-net as if it were a common net, and not spun from Piskey-wool by the Small People and made by a Wise Woman.
The bay, with its great beach of golden sand, its many hillocks—silvery-blue in places with sea-holly, and green with clumps of feathery tamarisk—lay open before her as she came out of the lane. There were many gulls on the wing to-day, white as the waves that broke gently over the rocks and against the sides of the cliffs. She looked about her, as was her wont, when she reached the beach, but there was nobody on the bar save an old man with his donkey, its panniers full of sand, coming up the beach on the way back to Higher Harlyn, where he lived.