“How can I put the thoughts out of my head?” she asked her father. “Sure, the fairies are putting them in again all the time, with their doings.”
“What are they doing, the day, to make you think of them?” asked the shoemaker.
“There’s the ring of green grass beyond the hawthorn bush,” she said timidly. “Danny borrowed the plow from Farmer Flynn and plowed through it over and over, but it came up again as round and green as ever. What else could make it but the fairies with their dancing feet?”
The shoemaker shook his head hopelessly at the child’s simple faith in her old grandmother’s stories. “It’s not like you, with your sense and handy ways about the house, to believe the fairy nonsense,” he said. “It must be because you have never learned the reading. After this you must come up here when your work in the house is done, and I’ll teach you the words. If you don’t believe it from my telling, you will from the books, that there are no fairies in Ireland.”
So it came about that on sunny afternoons through the winter two little girls played on the top of the hill near a fairy rath in far Donegal, in the north of Ireland. And often the shoemaker put his work down on the bench and called the children to his side, where he told them true stories of Irish history, and taught Kathleen to read from the pages of an old Irish book.
CHAPTER III
THE OLD WOMAN IN RED
“How many miles to Dublin town?
Threescore and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?