“No,” replied her sister; “but I have heard him tapping on his shoe many a time. Once I saw his scarlet cap under the hedge, but when I knelt down to look closer he threw sand in my eyes, as he always does, and was gone in a winkin’.”
“Belike it was a humming-bird,” said Mary Ellen. “Danny says the hedge is full of their nests. But what would you do with the purse, Kathleen dear?”
Kathleen’s eyes filled with tears and she looked at her sister with a sad face. “Oh, darlin’, it’s for you,” she said, “to give you the sight in your pretty blue eyes. I’m thinkin’ of it all the time, and faith, some day I’ll find a way. That’s why I took the dish of oaten stirabout and put it under the hawthorn bush last night, and why I put the bowl of milk on the window ledge. It’s for the ‘good people,’ so that they’ll know we take thought of them.”
“Did the ‘good people’ drink the milk?” asked the blind child eagerly.
“No, Mary Ellen,” said her sister, “but, listen! The stirabout was gone this morning, dish and all. The leprecaun must have taken it. I shall watch for him the night, and if I do catch the old shoemaker’s eye, I’ll hold it till he gives me his purse.”
“I’m thinkin’ that no one has ever held it yet," said Mary Ellen, snuggling against Kathleen’s shoulder, as if there might be some danger in holding a fairy dwarf spellbound with the look of one’s eye.
Kathleen lowered her voice and asked mysteriously, “Whist, Mary Ellen, do you mind old Granny Connor?”
“She that lives beyond the bog?” questioned Mary Ellen.
“Yes,” said Kathleen.
“I mind that she lives all alone, and that the father tells us not to go near her,” answered her sister. “She’s too friendly with the fairies.”