For a long time he refused to come in, for he said he was too old to dance, but at last he was persuaded, and the people brought him in and gave him a stool opposite me.  It was some time longer before he would take his turn, and when he did so, though he was met with great clapping of hands, he only danced for a few moments.  He did not know the dances in my book, he said, and did not care to dance to music he was not familiar with.  When the people pressed him again he looked across to me.

‘John,’ he said, in shaking English, ’have you got “Larry Grogan,” for it is an agreeable air?’

I had not, so some of the young men danced again to the ’Black Rogue,’ and then the party broke up.  The altercation was still going on at the cottage below us, and the people were anxious to see what was coming of it.

About ten o’clock a young man came in and told us that the fight was over.

‘They have been at it for four hours,’ he said, ’and now they’re tired.’

Indeed it is time they were, for you’d rather be listening to a man killing a pig than to the noise they were letting out of them.’

After the dancing and excitement we were too stirred up to be sleepy, so we sat for a long time round the embers of the turf, talking and smoking by the light of the candle.

From ordinary music we came to talk of the music of the fairies, and they told me this story, when I had told them some stories of my own:—­

A man who lives in the other end of the village got his gun one day and went out to look for rabbits in a thicket near the small Dun.  He saw a rabbit sitting up under a tree, and he lifted his gun to take aim at it, but just as he had it covered he heard a kind of music over his head, and he looked up into the sky.  When he looked back for the rabbit, not a bit of it was to be seen.

He went on after that, and he heard the music again.

Then he looked over a wall, and he saw a rabbit sitting up by the wall with a sort of flute in its mouth, and it playing on it with its two fingers!

‘What sort of rabbit was that?’ said the old woman when they had finished.  ’How could that be a right rabbit?  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.  ’Maybe you remember the bits of horns he had like handles on the end of his sticks?  Well, one day there was a priest over and he said to Pat—­“Is it the devil’s horns you have on your sticks, Pat?” “I don’t rightly know” said Pat, “but if it is, it’s the devil’s milk you’ve been drinking, since you’ve been able to drink, and the devil’s flesh you’ve been eating and the devil’s butter you’ve been putting on your bread, for I’ve seen the like of them horns on every old cow through the country."’