正文 THE UNTIRING ONES

It is one of the great troubles of life that we ot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our ehat we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this enta of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good heart as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their fasation. Love with them never grows weary, nor the circles of the stars tire out their dang feet. The Donegal peasants remember this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of the heaviness of the fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell stories about it that it may not be fotten. A short while ago, they say, two faeries, little creatures, one like a young man, one like a young woman, came to a farmer』s house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth aing all tidy. The night they came again, and while the farmer was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one room, and having arra round the walls, for the greater grandeur it seems, they began to dahey danced on and on, and days and days went by, and all the try-side came to look at them, but still their feet ired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while; and after three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, a and told them that the priest was ing. The little creatures when they heard this went back to their own try, and there their joy shall last as long as the points of the rushes are brown, the people say, and that is until God shall burn up the world with a kiss.

But it is not merely faeries who know untiring days, for there have been men and women who, falling uheir entment, have attained, perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more than faery abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty, blown hither and thither by the winds that awakehe stars, the dim kingdom has aowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and given them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat by rog her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and said that the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the dim kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old and die while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would be gifted with a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log out of the fire and bury it in the garden, and her child would live as long as it remained uned. The mother buried the log, and the child grew up, became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries, who came to her at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince died, and another prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful peasant girl in his turn; and after another seven hundred years he died also, and another prind another husband came in his stead, and so on until she had had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of the parish called upon her, and told her that she was a sdal to the whole neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was very sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and theold him about the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and then they bur, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and everyb

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