As soon as he could walk Davey had taken his share in the work of the homestead, rounding up cows in the early morning, feeding fowls, hunting for eggs in the ripening crops, scaring birds from the ploughed land when seed was in, and cutting ferns for the cowsheds and stables. His father was little more than a dour taskmaster to the boy. Davey had no memory of hearing him sing the gathering song of the Clan of Donald the Black.
His mother had taught him to read and count as she sat with her spinning wheel in the little garden in front of the house, or stitching by the fire indoors on winter evenings. Davey had to sit near her and spell out the words slowly from the Bible or the only other book she had, a shabby little red history. Sometimes when he was tired of reading, or the click and purr of her wheel set her mind wandering, she told him stories of the country over the sea where she was born. Davey knew that the song she sang sometimes when she was spinning was a song a fairy had taught a Welshwoman long ago so that her spinning would go well and quickly. She told him stories of the tylwyth teg—the little brown Welsh fairies. There was one he was never tired of hearing.
"Tell me about the farmer's boy who married the fairy, mother," he would say eagerly.
And she would tell him the story she had heard when she was a child.
"Once upon a time," she would say, "ever so long ago, there was a farmer's boy who minded his father's sheep on a wild, lonely mountain side. Not a mountain side like any we see in this country, Davey dear, but bare and dark, with great rocks on it. And one day, when he was all alone up there, he saw a girl looking at him from round a rock. Her hair was so dark that it seemed part of the rock, and her face was like one of the little flowers that grow on the mountain side. But he knew that it was not a flower's face, because there were eyes in it, bright, dark eyes—and a mouth on it ... a little, red mouth with tiny, white teeth behind it. They played on the mountain together for a long time and sometimes she helped him to drive his sheep. After a while they got so fond of each other that the boy asked her to go home with him to his father's house, and he told his father that he wanted to marry her.
"That night a lot of little men, riding on grey horses, came down from the mountain on a path of moonlight and clattered into the farmyard of the farmer of Ystrad. The smallest and fattest of the men, in a red coat ... they all wore red coats, and rode grey horses. Did I say that they all rode grey horses, Davey?"
"Yes, mother," Davey breathed.
She had this irritating little way of going back a word or two on her story if a thread caught on her wheel.
"Well—" she began again, and, as likely as not, her mind taken up with the tangled thread, would add: "Where was I, Davey?"
And Davey, all impatience for her to go on with the story, though he could have almost told it himself, would say: "And the smallest and fattest of the men, in a red coat—"