THE BIRTHDAY HONORS OF THE FAIRY QUEEN [*]
BY HAPGOOD MOORE
O
NCE upon a time there lived in green Erin a little girl by the name of Nora. Her home was a small thatched cottage of stone beside the brae at the foot of a mountain, in the midst of a woodland so deep that in the summer time when the trees were full the sun got its rays inside but a few hours of the day and you could see of the star-dust that covers the fields of the sky no piece larger than the palm of your hand.
It was a famous meeting-place for the fairies, this haunt at the foot of the mountain by the stream, for the Little Folk from the heather above used nightly to foregather in the meadow with the Little Folk from the woodland below, and there they danced the long night through among the shamrocks. But although Nora had heard about the fairies from her grandmother, who sat all day tending the peat fire, and something more about them from her mother when of an evening after supper she had time to speak to Nora of herself when she was a girl, yet Nora had never in all her life set eyes upon one of these feasters of the forest. For the fairies, mind you, come only to two kinds of folk, to those who believe in them and to those who need them. Now Nora believed in the fairies all right, all right, but she had never been in need of them until now, at this time that I'm telling ye of.
Now this same Nora was one of these lasses that is a wee bit gloomery. And ye don't know what this same gloomery is? Well, she was at times hindered by a rainy mornin' disposition. So it was plain enough to the fairies that she was in some need of them.
One day Nora went into the deep of the wildwood a few steps below her mother's cottage to a trysting-place where she often resorted when she had the time from her daily duties.
She had been unusually heckled that morning, as all of us are at times, by being obliged to do many things for the which she had little liking. The spot was a favorite one of Nora's.
There was a shelter of rocks above, almost like a cave or roof, and below there was a tiny stream of water that ran out of a spring in the back of the hill and sang its way down the slope to the brae below. In this pool Nora nearly always laid some field flowers, because they kept fresher there than anywhere else. From the low seat that Nora had made out of a stone in the back of her shelter she looked out into a sunny place in the woods, around which stood, as if they were pillars of a woodland palace, six gray beeches.