“What’s a bunnywig, Blumpits?”
“A bunnywig—you’re not for knowing what a bunnywig is—and you, Ian Mor, too! A bunnywig is a kunak.”[5]
“And what did Blumpits do?”
“He got on the bunnywig, in the green fern, and rode on it into fairyland, and no one saw him go but a squirrel. But no, Eilidh, I am not wanting to hear about that now; and don’t be looking at my bed there, for I haven’t got the sleep upon me yet. Tell me the rest of the tale about Fionula and Aed and Fiachra and Conn.”
“I wonder, now, if that’s because you really want to hear, or if it’s because you don’t want to be sent to bed?”
Peterkin had kicked aside his shoes, and taken off his socks, and was warming his feet at the fire. His body was bent nearly double, as he looked round, clutching the while his big toe in the hollow of his tiny fist.
“O Eilidh,” he said reproachfully, but with a light of such mischief in his eyes that Eilidh laughed. Then stooping, she took him on her lap, and after a few seconds, when all three looked idly and dreamily into the red fanwave in the heart of the peats, her lips moved again to the sorrowful sweet tale of the Children of Lir.
* * * * *
Year after year passed for the four swans that were the children of Lir. On that bleak and lonely sea of the Moyle they saw none of their own kind from year’s end to year’s end: only the sea-mew and the cormorant, the gannet and the tern, the slow droves of the pollack, the travelling schools of mackerel and herring, the swift seals migrating from isle to isle. With each Spring they saw the great solanders and wild swans flying northward towards the polar seas: thence, at the first days of winter, they saw them again flying southward, athirst for the thin blue wine of unfrozen seas.
There was no change save the changefulness of the seasons; the grey-black wave of winter lapsed into the grey-blue wave of spring, and out of the dark-blue wave of summer grew the grey-green wave of autumn.