“Let’s go and see,” Kathleen suggested, and the two children tiptoed carefully around the circle of rocks, forgetting all about the peddler, and the stockings, and Kathleen’s good resolution.
As they crept softly up to the open door of the grassy mound the sweet notes became a little tune, and a voice began singing the familiar words of an old Irish song.
Kathleen stood still, hardly daring to breathe, but Mary Ellen stepped boldly into the tiny room. “It’s the father himself,” she said, and Kathleen followed her sister, astonished indeed to find her father sitting on his work-bench and gently touching the strings of a small harp.
“I’m glad it wasn’t the fairy music we heard,” she said, after the surprise was over. “Grandma Barry says a spell is cast over him that hears it, and after the spell is taken off he pines away and dies in a year and a day.”
“Is it your own harp, Father?” asked Mary Ellen, thinking he might perhaps have borrowed it from the fairies.
“It was your mother’s,” he answered. “It was in her family from the days of the old Irish chiefs, and she showed me how to pick the strings.”
Mary Ellen touched it softly with her fingers. “It almost seems alive,” she said, as the strings gave out their sweet sounds.
“There was once a god in Ireland who owned a harp that was alive,” her father said with a smile. “He used to be called the ‘Mighty Father of Ireland,’ and his harp could do strange things when it had a mind. Sometimes he would go to the top of the mountain and play the whole procession of the seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—out of the strings of the harp.
“Once the god was captured by the giants, and was taken away to their castle, but he called to his harp for help, and it heard and answered. It flew through the air straight to its master, and killed nine of the giants as it flew.”
“Listen to him, telling us tales of the giants,” whispered Kathleen, but Mary Ellen was thinking of the harp and paid no attention to her sister.