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Updated: May 11, 2025
I dragged myself trembling to the window of the cottage and looked out. The moon was glittering across the bay, and there was no sound anywhere on the island. I am leaving in two days, and old Pat Dirane has bidden me goodbye. He met me in the village this morning and took me into 'his little tint, a miserable hovel where he spends the night.
When I came back to the cottage I found that among the women who had gone to the mainland was a daughter of the old woman's, and that her baby of about nine months had been left in the care of its grandmother. As I came in she was busy getting ready my dinner, and old Pat Dirane, who usually comes at this hour, was rocking the cradle.
Old Pat Dirane is dead, and several of my friends have gone to America; that is all the news they have to give me after an absence of many months. When I arrived at the cottage I was welcomed by the old people, and great excitement was made by some little presents I had bought them a pair of folding scissors for the old woman, a strop for her husband, and some other trifles.
He was dressed in miserable black clothes which seemed to have come from the mainland, and was so bent with rheumatism that, at a little distance, he looked more like a spider than a human being. Michael told me it was Pat Dirane, the story-teller old Mourteen had spoken of on the other island. I wished to turn back, as he appeared to be on his way to visit me, but Michael would not hear of it.
Sometimes a woman and a man ride together, but in this case the man sits in the usual position, and the woman sits sideways behind him, and holds him round the waist. Old Pat Dirane continues to come up every day to talk to me, and at times I turn the conversation to his experiences of the fairies.
I remember old Pat Dirane used to be telling us he was once out on the cliffs, and he saw a big rabbit sitting down in a hole under a flagstone. He called a man who was with him, and they put a hook on the end of a stick and ran it down into the hole. Then a voice called up to them "Ah, Phaddrick, don't hurt me with the hook!" 'Pat was a great rogue, said the old man.
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