But it is not merely faeries who know untiring days, for there have been men and women who, falling under their enchantment, 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 awakened the stars, the dim kingdom has acknowledged 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 rocking 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 unconsumed.  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 prince and 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 scandal 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 then she told him about the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and then they burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and everybody was pleased.  Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[FN#9] who went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the Birds’ Mountain at Sligo.

[FN#9] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would mean the old Woman Bare.  Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a very famous person, perhaps the mother of the Gods herself.  A friend of mine found her, as he thinks frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake on a mountain of the Fews.  Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or the storyteller’s mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough Leaths.

The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled hate and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with “yes” and “no,” or entangled their feet with the sorry net of “maybe” and “perhaps.”  The great winds came and took them up into themselves.