“That is the only purse I’ve got, Kathleen,” he said, “and my fingers have never seen the magic day when they could fill it with silver.”
Poor Mary Ellen’s blind eyes could see nothing of the shoemaker’s bench and the empty purse, but her heart felt all the loving thought that moved her sister to ask, “Then why did you not leave the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush? The little elf shoemaker sits there every night mending his shoe, with his purse of gold beside him. Belike you might snatch it yourself.”
“Oh, Kathleen, it’s myself will be the only shoemaker in these parts,” her father answered. “Put the foolish fancies out of your head now. No good ever came of such thoughts.”
It was not the first time he had told Kathleen to forget the fairy lore, and he had often checked Grandmother Barry when her unruly tongue touched upon the forbidden subject. “The childer’s heads should not be filled with such nonsense,” he said.
But it was not easy to check Great-grandmother Connell. She had lived ninety long years among a fairy-loving people, and liked to tell the Gaelic stories of old Ireland over and over again.
She it was who believed that Ireland was first inhabited by a race of giants. “They lived here with the birds and beasts before ever a man rode through the green forests,” she told Grandmother Barry.
“What became of them, then?” inquired her daughter.
“Sure, they turned themselves into the wee folk when men came here from over the seas, and they live under the rocks and trees and in the fairy mounds.”
“True it is,” agreed Grandmother Barry, and she told Kathleen what the great-grandmother had been saying in Gaelic about the giants and fairies.
That was how Kathleen came to know so many of the tales of old Ireland, and why she was always thinking of the wee folk.