United States or Spain ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We have in the preceding pages examined some of the principal groups of tales and superstitions relating to Fairies proper, that is to say, the Elves and Fays of Celtic and Teutonic tradition.
He was a perfect honey-pot of useless and unreliable information, was Barney O'Mara, and most learned in fairy lore; but for that matter, all the people walking along the road, the drivers, the boatman and guides, the men and women in the cottages where we stop in a shower or to inquire the way, relate stories of phookas, leprehauns, and sprites, banshees and all the various classes of elves and fays, as simply and seriously as they would speak of any other occurrences.
'It is true that one says that it is long time; oh! but long time, one of our ancestors has hid a treasure of gold, and of gold, and of gold enough to enrich my little Henri for the life. But all that, my children, it is but the accounts of fays 'She means fairy stories, whispered the Phoenix to Robert. 'Tell her what you have found.
For it was a grave matter, this parting with the Mantle of Immortality. The Queen of the Water Sprites spoke in her low, clear voice, and the words sounded like raindrops splashing upon a window-pane. "In all the world there is but one Mantle of Immortality," she said. The King of the Sound Fays added: "It has existed since the Beginning, and no mortal has ever dared to claim it."
We saw in a moment how the matter stood; Emily was really going to the fancy ball; and this, of the Queen of Fays, was the fantastic and too bewitching costume she had chosen to assume.
At the first glance I could not help thinking that I saw before me a city of the fays, destroyed at one fell blow by a superior power, and condemned to disappear without leaving a trace of its existence.
Her crazed imagination peopled the forest with weird uncanny things, and fearful tales she told of fays and bugaboos, of spectres and awful voices speaking from out the dank stillness of twilight hollows. Often she sent quaking to their pallets men who would have heard the war-whoop with scarcely quickened pulses.
She would see King Heremon, and Anniamus, in his silly old wizard's robe, and the Fays of Brittany, and all the rest of them ! A really nice White Lady may not have cared to finish the sentence, even to herself. One imagines the flash of the fairy eye, the stamp of the fairy foot. What could they do to her, any of them, with all their clacking of tongues and their wagging of heads?
We came but a few generations ago from where the gold curtains of the sun lie behind the westward pine-trees, and as we came we drove, year by year, those fays, those spent triflers, back before us. All this land was theirs once, and more and more towards our old home.
And in the fairy ring around Longfellow fountain, gnomes and fays and freshmen play hide-and-seek with the water nixies. The first Tree Day was Mr. Durant's idea; no one was more awake than he, in the old days, to Wellesley's poetic possibilities. And the first trees were gifts from Mr. Hunnewell; two beautiful exotics, Japanese golden evergreens one for 1879 and one for 1880.
Word Of The Day