"My son," the mother mild replied, "See that you pay the fairies their due; A tribute due should ne'er be denied-- Others don't grudge it, and why should you? Nor thrive their flocks nor kine, I ween, Who scorn or neglect the shian green."
"But, mother, the witch that lives down i' the glen?" "A widow, my son, with a fatherless oe, Who has seen much sorrow and years of woe; Give her as heretofore, my son, Of your curds and whey, and let her alone. And oh, my son, if you would be rich, And free from dread of fairy and witch. And happy and well-to-do through life-- Go get thee, my son, a winsome wife!"
The bachelor hied him home full soon-- He sent to the widow, far down in the glen, A kebbuck of cheese as round as the moon, Of oaten cakes he sent her ten, With a kindly message, "Come when you may For curds and whey in the good old way." He sent her withal, 'tis right you should know, A braw new kilt for her fatherless oe.
And ever he saw that his maidens paid To the fairies their due on the Fairy Knowe, Till the emerald sward was under the tread As velvet soft, and all aglow With wild flowers, such as fairies cull, Weaving their garlands and wreaths for the dance when the moon is full!
And lo! at last he took him a wife, A comely and winsome dame, I trow, Who shed a sunshine over his life, And silvered the wrinkles upon his brow. 'Twas well with the kine, and well with the dairy, Nor dreaded he ought from witch or fairy; (He had one of his own--she was hight Wee Mary!) And often they went to the cot by the linn, Where mavis and merle made merry din.
The English reader will probably require to be informed that oe--the Gaelic ogha--signifies a grandchild, while shian (Gaelic sithean) is a fairy knoll. To show what a power fairies were at one time in the land, and how wide-spread was the belief in them, we have only to consider that there is perhaps not a hamlet or township in the Highlands or Hebrides without its shian or green fairy knoll so called. Within half a mile of our own residence, for example, there is a Sithean Beag and a Sithean Mor, a Greater and Lesser Fairy Knoll; there is, besides, a Glacan-t' Shithein, the Fairy Knoll Glade, Tobar-an-t' Shithein, the Fairy Knoll Well; and a deep chasm, through which a mountain torrent plunges darkling, called Leum-an-t' Shithiche, the Fairy's Leap, with which there is probably connected some very wonderful story, although we have been unsuccessful hitherto in meeting with any one able or willing to repeat it. The truth is, that a belief in fairies and fairyland, or faery--faint, no doubt, and ill-defined now-a-days--still lingers ghost-like, the shadow of its more substantial former living self, in our straths and glens; and, in accordance with the old superstition, it is considered that the "good people" should only be spoken of on rare and unavoidable occasions, and then only in serious and respectable terms. Hence it is that you always find old people reluctant to impart such fairy lore as may be known to them, though garrulous enough on all other subjects; and hence, also, it happens that in our old Sgeulachdan--the Arabian Nights Entertainments of our Celtic forefathers--although you find giants, and dwarfs, and misbegotten beings of every imaginable shape and size; animals, too, that can speak and reason and lend their superhuman aid to prince and peasant in extremity, as well as genii, kelpies, and spirits of flood and fell, you rarely if ever meet with one of the "good folks," or fairies proper, introduced upon the scene. The people thoroughly believed in them, believed that they had a veritable existence, and although invisible to mortal eye, that they might be at your elbow at any moment; that they disliked being spoken of at all as a rule, and that a disrespectful word about them especially would inevitably be followed by some signal punishment, or "mischance," as it was more cautiously termed in the South--all this they believed, and therefore they held it wisest to speak of fairies, good folks though they were, as seldom as possible. The allusion to paying--