"Oh, yes!" Mary started again: "Strode into the kitchen and pinched the farmer's ear, and said that he was Penelop's father ... the girl's name was Penelop ... and that he would let her marry the farmer's son, and give her a dowry of health, wealth and happiness, on condition that nobody ever touched her with a piece of iron. If anybody put a piece of iron on her. Penelop's father said, she would fly back to the mountain and her own people, and never more sit by her husband's hearth and churn or spin for him. So the farmer's boy married Penelop and very happily they lived together. Everything on the farm prospered because of the fairy wife, though she wore a red petticoat and was like any other woman to look at, only more beautiful, and always busy and merry. She made fine soup and cheese, and her spinning was always good, and everybody was very fond of her. Then one day when her husband wanted to go to a fair, she ran into the fields to help him to catch his pony. And while he was throwing the bridle, the iron struck her arm—and that minute she vanished into the air before his eyes."
She paused for Davey's exclamation of wonderment; and then continued:
"Though he wandered all over the mountain calling her, Penelop never came back to her husband or the two little children she had left with him. But one very cold night in the winter, he wakened out of his sleep to hear her saying outside in the wind and rain:
"Lest my son should find it cold,
Place on him his father's coat.
Lest the fair one find it cold,
Place on her my petticoat."
Mary sang the words to a quaint little air of her own making, while Davey listened, big-eyed and awe-stricken.
"When the children grew up they had dark hair and bright, sparkling eyes like their mother," she would conclude, smiling at him. "And when they had children they were like them, too, so that people who came from the valley where the farmer's boy had married the fairy were always known by their looks, and they were called Pellings, or the children of Penelop, because it was said they had fairy blood in their veins."
Davey had always a thousand questions to ask. He liked to brood over the story; but he learnt more than fairy tales from his mother's memories of the old land. Her mind was beginning to be occupied with thoughts of his future. She and her husband were simple folk. Cameron could barely read and write, and what little knowledge Mary possessed she had already passed on to Davey. She knew what Donald Cameron's ambitions were, and after ten years of life with him had little doubt as to their achievement. The position that it would put Davey in had begun to be a matter of concern to her.
She was turning over in her mind her plans for his getting a good education, as she sat spinning beside the fireplace in the kitchen one evening, when her husband said suddenly:
"I wish to goodness you'd put that clacking thing away—have done with it now!"
"My wheel?" she asked, mild surprise in her eyes.