The folk of Furry Farm

by K. F. Purdon

“I’ll not heed that!” said Marg; and away she went.

There was a touch of frost in the air; the grass felt crisp underfoot. Dusk was gathering about the fields and the shadows began to lie very thick and dark under the trees and hedges. Margaret even shivered a little, as she hurried on. But that might be because all these lonesome signs of the night seemed worse, after leaving Kitty’s kitchen, gay and full up of the little chatter and laughing of the children, the baby in Kitty’s arm, and little Maggie standing beside her mother, to watch Mrs. Heffernan disappearing into the twilight. Marg loved to go to Grennan’s, and see the children, and maybe now and then coax one of them to sit on her knee and let her play with it. All the same, she was sighing now, to think how silent and sober her own house was, compared to Grennan’s.

She was thinking, going along, of the sound of the little voices there; “like music!” she said to herself. And with that word, she started. For, whether it was some echo carried on the wind from Grennan’s, or whatever it might have been, that very moment she thought she heard some sound of music coming out of the darkness to her as she was passing through the Big Pasture-Field.

“What can it be? Sure, I often heard tell of fairy music, and how that some can hear noises, like piannas and bugles, if they put their ear to the ground, close by a rath. But that can only be foolishness! I’ll not let the like of that talk stop me now, from going to the Holy Well, if there’s a cure, or even some small relief to be got there, for that poor leg of Mickey’s!”

So on she went, by the Furry Hills, until she got to the Holy Well, close under the Cleft of the Fairy Sword.

“It’s well the moon is up,” thought Marg, “the way I’ll have no delay in filling the can!”

The Holy Well lay in a corner, where the Big Pasture-Field sloped down to a hollow. Many’s the time Marg had seen it, of a Saint’s Day, with the lone thorn that leans out over the water all dressed up with bits of ribbon, and even rags, that the people would tie there, when there would be a Pattern at the Holy Well. And, besides, the girls had a great fashion of going there on Hallow Eve, to try old charms and “pistrogues,” “so that they might get to see whatever boy they were to marry.”

Well, this time, when Marg came in sight of the Well, wasn’t it all hid from her! ay and even the hollow where it lay was covered over with white columns of mist, that rose, and wavered, moving this way and that way as the night wind blew. It was steam from the Well, for the water there is warm. Not hot enough to make tea and boil eggs, as Mickey used to tell the people, but just nicely warm. And always in frost or cold, you could see the steam rising from it.

But as long as Marg had been at the Furry Farm, she had never chanced to see it like that. The Well lay a piece off from where she had business. And Marg never had been one to go stravaguing the fields for pleasure; and she wasn’t going to begin that fashion now, and she married.

Marg began to go slower, and to feel a bit fearful in herself. It was Hallow Eve, when, as everybody knows, the dead can come back to visit those they love. And here was she, all alone among the wide, silent fields, close to the Holy Well, with the moonlight white upon everything. And not a sound, only the whisper, whisper, of the stream that ran from the Well; and the soft, white clouds of steam, dancing and beckoning like strange beings that had life, this way and that way across the water....