The tent, a makeshift affair, consisting of two sculls and a tree branch, which Mr Button had sawed off from a dwarf aoa, and the stay-sail he had brought from the brig, was pitched in the centre of the beach, so as to be out of the way of falling cocoa-nuts, should the breeze strengthen during the night. The sun had set, but the moon had not yet risen as they sat in the starlight on the sand near the temporary abode.
“What’s the things you said made the boots for the people, Paddy?” asked Dick, after a pause.
“Which things?”
“You said in the wood I wasn’t to talk, else—”
“Oh, the Cluricaunes—the little men that cobbles the Good People’s brogues. Is it them you mane?”
“Yes,” said Dick, not knowing quite whether it was them or not that he meant, but anxious for information that he felt would be curious. “And what are the good people?”
“Sure, where were you born and bred that you don’t know the Good People is the other name for the fairies—savin’ their presence?”
“There aren’t any,” replied Dick. “Mrs Sims said there weren’t.”
“Mrs James,” put in Emmeline, “said there were. She said she liked to see children b’lieve in fairies. She was talking to another lady, who’d got a red feather in her bonnet, and a fur muff. They were having tea, and I was sitting on the hearthrug. She said the world was getting too—something or another, an’ then the other lady said it was, and asked Mrs James did she see Mrs Someone in the awful hat she wore Thanksgiving Day. They didn’t say anything more about fairies, but Mrs James——”
“Whether you b’lave in them or not,” said Paddy, “there they are. An’ maybe they’re poppin’ out of the wood behint us now, an’ listenin’ to us talkin’; though I’m doubtful if there’s any in these parts, though down in Connaught they were as thick as blackberries in the ould days. O musha! musha! the ould days, the ould days! when will I be seein’ thim again? Now, you may b’lave me or b’lave me not, but me own ould father—God rest his sowl!—was comin’ over Croagh Patrick one night before Christmas with a bottle of whisky in one hand of him, and a goose, plucked an’ claned an’ all, in the other, which same he’d won in a lottery, when, hearin’ a tchune no louder than the buzzin’ of a bee, over a furze-bush he peeps, and there, round a big white stone, the Good People were dancing in a ring hand in hand, an’ kickin’ their heels, an’ the eyes of them glowin’ like the eyes of moths; and a chap on the stone, no bigger than the joint of your thumb, playin’ to thim on a bagpipes. Wid that he let wan yell an’ drops the goose an’ makes for home, over hedge an’ ditch, boundin’ like a buck kangaroo, an’ the face on him as white as flour when he burst in through the door, where we was all sittin’ round the fire burnin’ chestnuts to see who’d be married the first.