“They say you have it hidden in a purse that can never grow empty, and that you keep it in the place where you mend your shoes,” the child replied, looking away from her father and off across the bog to the purple mountains. “And no one knows where it is that you have your work-bench,” she added with a sigh.
“Look at me, Kathleen,” said her father.
The child turned her gray eyes up to his, gray and honest like her own.
“Did you think when you put the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush last night, that you would see me take it up?”
“Oh, no, no!” cried Kathleen. “Sure, I thought it would be the tiny man, himself, who would find it.”
“But it was myself who found it and took it away, when you were sound asleep in your bed,” said her father.
Kathleen jumped up in surprise, but Mary Ellen nodded her curly head, as if she knew all the time that it was not the fairy.
“I saw Granny Connor’s red cloak bobbing across the bog last night, as I stood at my bench mending an old shoe,” her father continued, “and I watched you stop under the oak tree to talk with her. When I found the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush I knew it was time for me to put an end to these foolish notions about the good people, and tell you the true words about Ireland’s brave men and women. You should be learning about Brian Boru, who drove the Danes out of Ireland, and Daniel O’Connell, the greatest orator ever born on Irish soil. Those are the men for you to be thinking of, instead of the leprecaun.”
Kathleen looked at him earnestly. “It’s not one word I’m believin’ of all they say about you, Father,” she said.
“It is what they say about the fairy people that’s not for you to believe,” he answered, and rising from the stone slab, he took a hand of each of the children and led them across the top of the hill to a grassy mound which was encircled by a ring of jagged rocks.