“Faith,” said the fairy-man, “I have not the Gaelic, more's the pity, but I know enough English to say you're the prettiest girl ever I set eyes on since I left my own place.”
(Ho! hoi was he not the cunning one? The fairies for me for gallantry!)
“One of such judgment can hardly be uncanny,” thought Marseli, so she stayed and cracked with him in the English tongue.
The two of them walked up over the sand to the birch-trees, and under the birches the little fellow asked Marseli to sit down.
“You are bigger than I looked for in a sea-fairy,” said she when the crack was a little bit on.
“A fairy?” said the little fellow, looking at her in the flash of an eye.
“Yes! Though I said just now that you took one fast at her word, the truth to tell is, that always when the tide went out I sang at your back-doors the song you heard to-day for the first time. I learned it from Beann Francie in the Horse Park.”
The stranger had a merry laugh—not the roar of a Finne fisherman—and a curions way of hitching the shoulders, and the laugh and the shoulder-hitch were his answer for Marseli.
“You'll be a king in the sea—in your own place—or a prince maybe,” said the girl, twisting rushes in her hand.
The man gave a little start and got red at the face.