Yesterday he took me aside, and said he would tell me a secret he had never yet told to any person in the world.

‘Take a sharp needle,’ he said, ’and stick it in under the collar of your coat, and not one of them will be able to have power on you.’

Iron is a common talisman with barbarians, but in this case the idea of exquisite sharpness was probably present also, and, perhaps, some feeling for the sanctity of the instrument of toil, a folk-belief that is common in Brittany.

The fairies are more numerous in Mayo than in any other county, though they are fond of certain districts in Galway, where the following story is said to have taken place.

’A farmer was in great distress as his crops had failed, and his cow had died on him.  One night he told his wife to make him a fine new sack for flour before the next morning; and when it was finished he started off with it before the dawn.

’At that time there was a gentleman who had been taken by the fairies, and made an officer among them, and it was often people would see him and him riding on a white horse at dawn and in the evening.

’The poor man went down to the place where they used to see the officer, and when he came by on his horse, he asked the loan of two hundred and a half of flour, for he was in great want.

’The officer called the fairies out of a hole in the rocks where they stored their wheat, and told them to give the poor man what he was asking.  Then he told him to come back and pay him in a year, and rode away.

’When the poor man got home he wrote down the day on a piece of paper, and that day year he came back and paid the officer.’

When he had ended his story the old man told me that the fairies have a tenth of all the produce of the country, and make stores of it in the rocks.

It is a Holy Day, and I have come up to sit on the Dun while the people are at Mass.

A strange tranquility has come over the island this morning, as happens sometimes on Sunday, filling the two circles of sea and sky with the quiet of a church.

The one landscape that is here lends itself with singular power to this suggestion of grey luminous cloud.  There is no wind, and no definite light.  Aranmor seems to sleep upon a mirror, and the hills of Connemara look so near that I am troubled by the width of the bay that lies before them, touched this morning with individual expression one sees sometimes in a lake.

On these rocks, where there is no growth of vegetable or animal life, all the seasons are the same, and this June day is so full of autumn that I listen unconsciously for the rustle of dead leaves.

The first group of men are coming out of the chapel, followed by a crowd of women, who divide at the gate and troop off in different directions, while the men linger on the road to gossip.

The silence is broken; I can hear far off, as if over water, a faint murmur of Gaelic.