CHAPTER XI.
FAIRYLAND.
"And never would I tire, Janet,
In Fairyland to dwell."
SO runs the song. Who would weary of so sweet a place? At least, we think of it as a sweet place; but like this own world of ours, it was whatever a man's eyes made it: good and gracious to the good, troublous to the evil. According to an old belief, a mean or angry, or untruthful person, always exposed himself, by the very violence of his wrong-doing, to become an inmate of Fairyland; and for such a one, it could not have been all sunshine. A foot set upon the fairy-ring was enough to cause a mortal to be whisked off, pounded, pinched, bewildered, and left far from home. It was a strange experience, and it is recorded that it befell many a lad and maid to be loosed from earth, and cloistered for uncounted years, to return, like our Catskill hero, Rip Van Winkle, after what he supposes to be a little time, and to find that generations had passed away. For those absent took no thought of time's passing, and on reaching earth again, would begin where their lips had dropped a sentence half-spoken, a hundred years before. Tales of such truants are common the world over.
Gitto Bach (little Griffith) was a Welsh farmer's boy, who looked after sheep on the mountain-top. When he came home at evenfall he often showed his brothers and sisters bits of paper stamped like money. Now when it was given to him, it was real money; but the fairy-gifts would not bear handling, and turned useless and limp as soon as Gitto showed them. One day he did not return. After two years his mother found him one morning at the door, smiling, and with a bundle under his arm. She asked him, with many tears, where he had been so long, while they had mourned for him as dead. "It is only yesterday I went away!" said Gitto. "See the pretty clothes the mountain-children gave me, for dancing with them to the music of their harps." And he opened his bundle, and showed a beautiful dress: but his mother saw it was only paper, after all, like the fairy money.
GITTO BACH AND THE FAIRIES.
