CHAPTER I
THE MOUNTAIN STREAM
Once upon a time, there lived in a valley in Scotland, a boy about twelve years of age, the son of a shepherd. His mother was dead, and he had no sister or brother. His father was out all day on the hills with his sheep; but when he came home at night, he was as sure of finding the cottage neat and clean, the floor swept, a bright fire, and his supper waiting for him, as if he had had wife and daughter to look after his household, instead of only a boy. Therefore, although Colin could only read and write, and knew nothing of figures, he was ten times wiser, and more capable of learning anything, than if he had been at school all his days.2 He was never at a loss when anything had to be done. Somehow, he always blundered into the straight road to his end, while another would be putting on his shoes to look for it. And yet all the time that he was busiest working, he was busiest building castles in the air. I think the two ought always to go together.
And so Colin was never over-worked, but had plenty of time to himself. In winter he spent it in reading by the fireside, or carving pieces of wood with his pocket knife; and in summer he always went out for a ramble. His great delight was in a little stream which ran down the valley from the mountains above. Up this burn he would wander every afternoon, with his hands in his pockets.3 He never got far, however—he was so absorbed in watching its antics. Sometimes he would sit on a rock, staring at the water as it hurried through the stones, scolding, expostulating, muttering, and always having its own way. Sometimes he would stop by a deep pool, and watch the crimson spotted trouts, darting about as if their thoughts and not their tails sent them where they wanted to go. And when he stopped at the little cascade, tumbling smooth and shining over a hollowed rock, he seldom got beyond it.
But there was one thing which always troubled him. It was, that when the stream came near the cottage, it could find no other way than through the little yard where stood the cowhouse and the pigsty; and there, not finding a suitable channel, spread abroad in a disconsolate manner, becoming rather a puddle than a brook, all defiled with the treading of the cloven feet of the cow and the pigs. In fact, it looked quite lost and ruined; so that even after it had, with much labour, got out of the yard again, it took a long time to gather itself together, and not quite succeeding, slipped away as if ashamed, with spent forces and poverty-stricken speed; till at length, meeting the friendly help of a rivulet coming straight from the hills, it gathered heart and bounded on afresh.
“It can’t be all that the cow drinks that makes the difference,” said Colin to himself. “The pigs don’t care about it. I do believe it’s affronted at being dashed about. The cow isn’t dirty, but she’s rather stupid and inconsiderate. The pigs are dirty. Something must be done. Let me see.”
He reconnoitred the whole ground. Upon the other side of the house all was rock, through which he could not cut; and he was forced to the conclusion that the only other course for the stream to take lay right through the cottage.
To most engineers this would have appeared the one course to be avoided; but Colin’s heart danced at the thought of having his dear burn running right through the house. How cool it would be all the summer! How convenient for cooking; and how handy at meals! And then the music of it! How it would tell him stories, and sing him to sleep at night! What a companion it would be when his father was away! And then he could bathe in it when he liked. In winter—ah!—to be sure! But winter was a long way off.
The very next day his father went to the fair. So Colin set to work at once.
It was not such a very difficult undertaking; for the walls of the cottage, and the floor as well, were of clay—the former nearly sun-dried into a brick, and the latter trampled hard; but still both assailable by pickaxe and spade. He cut through the walls, and dug a channel along the floor, letting in stones in the bottom and sides. After it got out of the cottage and through the small garden in front, it should find its own way to the channel below, for here the hill was very steep.
The same evening his father came home.
“What have you been about, Colin?” he asked, in great surprise, when he saw the trench in the floor.
“Wait a minute, father,” said Colin, “till I have got your supper, and then I’ll tell you.”
So when his father was seated at the table Colin darted out, and hurrying up to the stream, broke through the bank just in the place whence a natural hollow led straight to the cottage. The stream dashed out like a wild creature from a cage, faster than he could follow, and shot through the wall of the cottage. His father gave a shout; and when Colin went in, he found him sitting with his spoon half way to his mouth, and his eyes fixed on the muddy water which rushed foaming through his floor.
“It will soon be clean, father,” said Colin, “and then it will be so nice!”
His father made no answer, but continued staring. Colin went on with a long list of the advantages of having a brook running through your house. At length his father smiled and said:—
“You are a curious creature, Colin. But why shouldn’t you have your fancies as well as older people? We’ll try it awhile, and then we’ll see about it.”
The fact was, Colin’s father had often thought what a lonely life the boy’s was. And it seemed hard to take from him any pleasure he could have. So out rushed Colin at the front, to see how the brook would take the shortest way headlong down the hill to its old channel. And to see it go tumbling down that hill was a sight worth living for.
“It is a mercy,” said Colin, “it has no neck to break, or it would break twenty times in a minute. It flings itself from rock to rock right down, just as I should like to do, if it weren’t for my neck.”
All that evening he was out and in without a moment’s rest; now up to the beginning of the cut, now following the stream down to the cottage; then through the cottage, and out again at the front door to see it dart across the garden, and dash itself down the hill.
At length his father told him he must go to bed. He took one more peep at the water, which was running quite clear now, and obeyed. His father followed him presently.
The bed was about a couple of yards from the edge of the brook. And as Colin was always first up in the morning, he slept at the front of the bed. So he lay for some time gazing at the faint glimmer of the water in the dull red light from the sod-covered fire, and listening to its sweet music as it hurried through to the night again, till its murmur changed into a lullaby, and sung him fast asleep.
Soon he found that he was coming awake again. He was lying listening to the sound of the busy stream. But it had gathered more sounds since he went to sleep—amongst the rest one of boards knocking together, and a tiny chattering and sweet laughter, like the tinkling of heather-bells. He opened his eyes. The moon was shining along the brook, lighting the smoky rafters above with its reflection from the water, which had been dammed back at its outlet from the cottage, so that it lay bank-full and level with the floor. But its surface was hardly to be seen, save by an occasional glimmer, for the crowded boats of a fairy fleet which had just arrived. The sailors were as busy as sailors could be, mooring along the banks, or running their boats high and dry on the shore. Some had little sails which glimmered white in the moonshine—half-lowered, or blowing out in the light breeze that crept down the course of the stream. Some were pulling about through the rest, oars flashing, tiny voices calling, tiny feet running, tiny hands hauling at ropes that ran through blocks of shining ivory. On the shore stood groups of fairy ladies in all colours of the rainbow, green predominating, waited upon by gentlemen all in green, but with red and yellow feathers in their caps. The queen had landed on the side next to Colin, and in a few minutes more twenty dances were going at once along the shores of the fairy river. And there lay great Colin’s face, just above the bed-clothes, glowering at them like an ogre.
At last, after a few dances, he heard a clear, sweet, ringing voice say,
“I’ve had enough of this. I’m tired of doing like the big people. Let’s have a game of Hey Cockolorum Jig!”4
That instant every group sprang asunder, and every fairy began a frolic on his own account. They scattered all over the cottage, and Colin lost sight of most of them.
While he lay watching the antics of two of those near him, who behaved more like clowns at a fair than the gentlemen they had been a little while before, he heard a voice close to his ear; but though he looked everywhere about his pillow, he could see nothing. The voice stopped the moment he began to look but began again as soon as he gave it up.
“You can’t see me. I’m talking to you through a hole in the head of your bed.”
Colin knew the knot-hole well enough.
“Don’t look,” said the voice. “If the queen sees me I shall be pinched. Oh, please don’t.”
The voice sounded as if its owner would cry presently. So Colin took good care not to look. It went on:
“Please, I am a little girl, not a fairy. The queen stole me the minute I was born, seven years ago, and I can’t get away. I don’t like the fairies. They are so silly. And they never grow any wiser. I grow wiser every year. I want to get back to my own people. They won’t let me. They make me play at being somebody else all night long, and sleep all day. That’s what they do themselves. And I should so like to be myself. The queen says that’s not the way to be happy at all; but I do want very much to be a little girl. Do take me.”
“How am I to get you?” asked Colin in a whisper, which sounded, after the sweet voice of the changeling, like the wind in a field of dry beans.
“The queen is so pleased with you that she is sure to offer you something. Choose me. Here she comes.”
Immediately he heard another voice, shriller and stronger, in front of him; and, looking about, saw standing on the edge of the bed a lovely little creature, with a crown glittering with jewels, and a rush for a sceptre in her hand, the blossom of which shone like a bunch of garnets.
“You great staring creature!” she said. “Your eyes are much too big to see with. What clumsy hobgoblins you thick folk are!”
So saying, she laid her wand across Colin’s eyes.
“Now, then, stupid!” she said; and that instant Colin saw the room like a huge barn, full of creatures about two feet high. The beams overhead were crowded with fairies, playing all imaginable tricks, scrambling everywhere, knocking each other over, throwing dust and soot in each other’s faces, grinning from behind corners, dropping on each other’s necks, and tripping up each other’s heels. Two had got hold of an empty egg-shell, and coming behind one sitting on the edge of the table, and laughing at some one on the floor, tumbled it right over him, so that he was lost in the cavernous hollow. But the lady-fairies mingled in none of these rough pranks. Their tricks were always graceful, and they had more to say than to do.
But the moment the queen had laid her wand across his eyes, she went on:
“Know, son of a human mortal, that thou hast pleased a queen of the fairies. Lady as I am over the elements, I cannot have everything I desire. One thing thou hast given me. Years have I longed for a path down this rivulet to the ocean below. Your horrid farm-yard, ever since your great-grandfather built this cottage, was the one obstacle. For we fairies hate dirt, not only in houses, but in fields and woods as well, and above all in running streams. But I can’t talk like this any longer. I tell you what, you are a dear good boy, and you shall have what you please. Ask me for anything you like.”
“May it please your majesty,” said Colin, very deliberately, “I want a little girl that you carried away some seven years ago the moment she was born. May it please your majesty, I want her.”
“It does not please my majesty,” cried the queen, whose face had been growing very black. “Ask for something else.”
“Then, whether it pleases your majesty or not,” said Colin, bravely, “I hold your majesty to your word. I want that little girl, and that little girl I will have, and nothing else.”
“You dare to talk so to me, you thick!”
“Yes, your majesty.”
“Then you sha’n’t have her.”
“Then I’ll turn the brook right through the dunghill,” said Colin. “Do you think I’ll let you come into my cottage to play at high jinks when you please, if you behave to me like this?”
And Colin sat up in bed, and looked the queen in the face. And as he did so he caught sight of the loveliest little creature peeping round the corner at the foot of the bed. And he knew she was the little girl, because she was quiet, and looked frightened, and was sucking her thumb.
Then the queen, seeing with whom she had to deal, and knowing that queens in Fairyland are bound by their word, began to try another plan with him. She put on her sweetest manner and looks; and as she did so, the little face at the foot of the bed grew more troubled, and the little head shook itself, and the little thumb dropped out of the little mouth.
“Dear Colin,” said the queen, “you shall have the girl. But you must do something for me first.”
The little girl shook her head as fast as ever she could, but Colin was taken up with the queen.
“To be sure I will. What is it?” he said.
And so he was bound by a new bargain, and was in the queen’s power.
“You must fetch me a bottle of Carasoyn,” said she.5
“What is that?” asked Colin.
“A kind of wine that makes people happy.”
“Why, are you not happy already?”
“No, Colin,” answered the queen, with a sigh.
“You have everything you want.”
“Except the Carasoyn,” returned the queen.
“You do whatever you like, and go wherever you please.”
“That’s just it. I want something that I neither like nor please—that I don’t know anything about. I want a bottle of Carasoyn.”
And here she cried like a spoilt child, not like a sorrowful woman.
“But how am I to get it?”
“I don’t know. You must find out.”
“Oh! that’s not fair,” cried Colin.
But the queen burst into a fit of laughter that sounded like the bells of a hundred frolicking sheep, and bounding away to the side of the river, jumped on board of her boat. And like a swarm of bees gathered the courtiers and sailors; two creeping out of the bellows, one at the nozzle and the other at the valve; three out of the basket-hilt of the broadsword on the wall; six all white out of the meal-tub; and so from all parts of the cottage to the river-side. And amongst them Colin spied the little girl creeping on board the queen’s boat, with her pinafore to her eyes; and the queen was shaking her fist at her. In five minutes more they had all scrambled into the boats, and the whole fleet was in motion down the stream. In another moment the cottage was empty, and everything had returned to its usual size.
“They’ll be all dashed to pieces on the rocks,” cried Colin, jumping up, and running into the garden. When he reached the fall, there was nothing to be seen but the swift plunge and rush of the broken water in the moonlight. He thought he heard cries and shouts coming up from below, and fancied he could distinguish the sobs of the little maiden whom he had so foolishly lost. But the sounds might be only those of the water, for to the different voices of a running stream there is no end. He followed its course all the way to its old channel, but saw nothing to indicate any disaster. Then he crept back to his bed, where he lay thinking what a fool he had been, till he cried himself to sleep over the little girl who would never grow into a woman.
CHAPTER III
THE OLD WOMAN AND HER HEN
In the morning, however, his courage had returned; for the word Carasoyn was always saying itself in his brain.
“People in fairy stories,” he said, “always find what they want. Why should not I find this Carasoyn? It does not seem likely. But the world doesn’t go round by likely. So I will try.”
But how was he to begin?
When Colin did not know what to do, he always did something. So as soon as his father was gone to the hill, he wandered up the stream down which the fairies had come.
“But I needn’t go on so,” he said, “for if the Carasoyn grew in the fairies’ country, the queen would know how to get it.”
All at once he remembered how he had lost himself on the moor when he was a little boy; and had gone into a hut and found there an old woman spinning. And she had told him such stories! and shown him the way home. So he thought she might be able to help him now; for he remembered that she was very old then, and must be older and still wiser now. And he resolved to go and look for the hut, and ask the old woman what he was to do.
So he left the stream, and climbed the hill, and soon came upon a desolate moor. The sun was clouded and the wind was cold, and everything looked dreary. And there was no sign of a hut anywhere. He wandered on, looking for it; and all at once found that he had forgotten the way back. At the same instant he saw the hut right before him. And then he remembered it was when he had lost himself that he saw it the former time.
“It seems the way to find some things is to lose yourself,” said he to himself.
He went up to the cottage, which was like a large beehive built of turf, and knocked at the door.
“Come in, Colin,” said a voice; and he entered, stooping low.
The old woman sat by a little fire, spinning, after the old fashion, with a distaff and spindle.6 She stopped the moment he went in.
“Come and sit down by the fire,” she said, “and tell me what you want.”
Then Colin saw that she had no eyes.
“I am very sorry you are blind,” he said.
“Never you mind that, my dear. I see more than you do for all my blindness. Tell me what you want, and I shall see at least what I can do for you.”
“How do you know I want anything?” asked Colin.
“Now that’s what I don’t like,” said the old woman. “Why do you waste words? Words should not be wasted any more than crumbs.”
“I beg your pardon,” returned Colin. “I will tell you all about it.”
And so he told her the whole story.
“Oh those children! those children!” said the old woman. “They are always doing some mischief. They never know how to enjoy themselves without hurting somebody or other. I really must give that queen a bit of my mind. Well, my dear, I like you; and I will tell you what must be done. You shall carry the silly queen her bottle of Carasoyn. But she won’t like it when she gets it, I can tell her. That’s my business, however.—First of all, Colin, you must dream three days without sleeping. Next, you must work three days without dreaming. And last, you must work and dream three days together.”
“How am I to do all that?”
“I will help you all I can, but a great deal will depend on yourself. In the meantime you must have something to eat.”
So saying, she rose, and going to a corner behind her bed, returned with a large golden-coloured egg in her hand. This she laid on the hearth, and covered over with hot ashes. She then chatted away to Colin about his father, and the sheep, and the cow, and the house-work, and showed that she knew all about him. At length she drew the ashes off the egg, and put it on a plate.
“It shines like silver now,” said Colin.
“That is a sign it is quite done,” said she, and set it before him.
Colin had never tasted anything half so nice. And he had never seen such a quantity of meat in an egg. Before he had finished it he had made a hearty meal. But, in the meantime, the old woman said,—
“Shall I tell you a story while you have your dinner?”
“Oh, yes, please do,” answered Colin. “You told me such stories before!”
“Jenny,” said the old woman, “my wool is all done. Get me some more.”
And from behind the bed out came a sober-coloured, but large and beautifully-shaped hen. She walked sedately across the floor, putting down her feet daintily, like a prim matron as she was, and stopping by the door, gave a cluck, cluck.
“Oh, the door is shut, is it?” said the old woman.
“Let me open it,” said Colin.
“Do, my dear.”
“What are all those white things?” he asked, for the cottage stood in the middle of a great bed of grass with white tops.7
“Those are my sheep,” said the old woman. “You will see.”
Into the grass Jenny walked, and stretching up her neck, gathered the white woolly stuff in her beak. When she had as much as she could hold, she came back and dropped it on the floor; then picked the seeds out and swallowed them, and went back for more. The old woman took the wool, and fastening it on her distaff, began to spin, giving the spindle a twirl, and then dropping it and drawing out the thread from the distaff. But as soon as the spindle began to twirl, it began to sparkle all the colours of the rainbow, that it was a delight to see. And the hands of the woman, instead of being old and wrinkled, were young and long-fingered and fair, and they drew out the wool, and the spindle spun and flashed, and the hen kept going out and in, bringing wool and swallowing the seeds, and the old woman kept telling Colin one story after another, till he thought he could sit there all his life and listen. Sometimes it seemed the spindle that was flashing them, sometimes the long fingers that were spinning them, and sometimes the hen that was gathering them off the heads of the long dry grass and bringing them in her beak and laying them down on the floor.
All at once the spindle grew slower, and gradually ceased turning; the fingers stopped drawing out the thread the hen retreated behind the bed, and the voice of the blind woman was silent.
“I suppose it is time for me to go,” said Colin.
“Yes, it is,” answered his hostess.
“Please tell me, then, how I am to dream three days without sleeping.”
“That’s over,” said the old woman. “You’ve just finished that part. I told you I would help you all I could.”
“Have I been here three days, then?” asked Colin, in astonishment.
“And nights too. And I and Jenny and the spindle are quite tired and want to sleep. Jenny has got three eggs to lay besides. Make haste, my boy.”
“Please, then, tell me what I am to do next.”
“Jenny will put you in the way. When you come where you are going, you will tell them that the old woman with the spindle desires them to lift Cumberbone Crag a yard higher, and to send a flue under Stonestarvit Moss. Jenny, show Colin the way.”
Jenny came out with a surly cluck, and led him a good way across the heath by a path only a hen could have found. But she turned suddenly and walked home again.
CHAPTER IV
THE GOBLIN BLACKSMITH
Colin could just perceive something suggestive of a track, which he followed till the sun went down. Then he saw a dim light before him, keeping his eye upon which, he came at last to a smithy, where, looking in at the open door, he saw a huge, humpbacked smith working a fore-hammer in each hand.8
He grinned out of the middle of his breast when he saw Colin, and said, “Come in; come in: my youngsters will be glad of you.”
He was an awful looking creature, with a great hare lip, and a red ball for a nose. Whatever he did—speak, or laugh, or sneeze—he did not stop working one moment. As often as the sparks flew in his face, he snapped at them with his eyes (which were the colour of a half-dead coal), now with this one, now with that; and the more sparks they got into them the brighter his eyes grew. The moment Colin entered, he took a huge bar of iron from the furnace, and began laying on it so with his two fore-hammers that he disappeared in a cloud of sparks, and Colin had to shut his eyes and be glad to escape with a few burns on his face and hands. When he had beaten the iron till it was nearly black, the smith put it in the fire again, and called out a hundred odd names:
“Here Gob, Shag, Latchit, Licker, Freestone, Greywhackit, Mousetrap, Potatoe-pot, Blob, Blotch, Blunker—–”9
And ever as he called, one dwarf after another came tumbling out of the chimney in the corner of which the fire was roaring. They crowded about Colin and began to make hideous faces and spit fire at him. But he kept a bold countenance. At length one pinched him, and he could not stand that, but struck him hard on the head. He thought he had knocked his own hand to pieces, it gave him such a jar; and the head rung like an iron pot.
“Come, come, young man?” cried the smith; “you keep your hands off my children.”
“Tell them to keep their hands off me, then,” said Colin.
And calling to mind his message, just as they began to crowd about him again with yet more spiteful looks, he added—
“Here, you imps! I won’t stand it longer. Get to your work directly. The old woman with the spindle says you’re to lift Cumberbone Crag a yard higher, and to send a flue under Stonestarvit Moss.”
In a moment they had vanished in the chimney. In a moment more the smithy rocked to its foundations. But the smith took no notice, only worked more furiously than ever. Then came a great crack and a shock that threw Colin on the floor. The smith reeled, but never lost hold of his hammers or missed a blow on the anvil.
“Those boys will do themselves a mischief,” he said; then turning to Colin, “Here, you sir, take that hammer. This is no safe place for idle people. If you don’t work you’ll be knocked to pieces in no time.”
The same moment there came a wind from the chimney that blew all the fire into the middle of the smithy. The smith dashed up upon the forge, and rushed out of sight. Presently he returned with one of the goblins under his arm kicking and screaming, laid his ugly head down on the anvil, where he held him by the neck, and hit him a great blow with his hammer above the ear. The hammer rebounded, the goblin gave a shriek, and the smith flung him into the chimney, saying—
“That’s the only way to serve him. You’ll be more careful for one while, I guess, Slobberkin.”
And thereupon he took up his other hammer and began to work again, saying to Colin,
“Now, young man, as long as you get a blow with your hammer in for every one of mine, you’ll be quite safe; but if you stop, or lose the beat, I won’t be answerable to the old woman with the spindle for the consequences.”
Colin took up the hammer and did his best. But he soon found that he had never known what it was to work. The smith worked a hammer in each hand, and it was all Colin could do to work his little hammer with both his hands; so it was a terrible exertion to put in blow for blow with the smith. Once, when he lost the time, the smith’s fore-hammer came down on the head of his, beat it flat on the anvil, and flung the handle to the other end of the smithy, where it struck the wall like the report of a cannon.
“I told you,” said the smith. “There’s another. Make haste, for the boys will be in want of you and me too before they get Cumberbone Crag half a foot higher.”
Presently in came the biggest-headed of the family, out of the chimney.
“Six-foot wedges, and a three-yard crowbar!” he said; “or Cumberbone will cumber our bones presently.”
The smith rushed behind the bellows, brought out a bar of iron three inches thick or so, cut off three yards, put the end in the fire, blew with might and main, and brought it out as white as paper. He and Colin then laid upon it till the end was flattened to an edge, which the smith turned up a little. He then handed the tool to the imp.
“Here, Gob,” he said; “run with it, and the wedges will be ready by the time you come back.”
Then to the wedges they set. And Colin worked like three. He never knew how he could work before. Not a moment’s pause, except when the smith was at the forge for another glowing mass! And yet, to Colin’s amazement, the more he worked, the stronger he seemed to grow. Instead of being worn out, the moment he had got his breath he wanted to be at it again; and he felt as if he had grown twice the size since he took hammer in hand. And the goblins kept running in and out all the time, now for one thing, now for another. Colin thought if they made use of all the tools they fetched, they must be working very hard indeed. And the convulsions felt in the smithy bore witness to their exertions somewhere in the neighbourhood.
And the longer they worked together, the more friendly grew the smith. At length he said—his words always adding energy to his blows—
“What does the old woman want to improve Stonestarvit Moss for?”
“I didn’t know she did want to improve it,” returned Colin.
“Why, anybody may see that. First, she wants Cumberbone Crag a yard higher—just enough to send the north-east blast over the Moss without touching it. Then she wants a hot flue passed under it. Plain as a fore-hammer!—What did you ask her to do for you? She’s always doing things for people and making my bones ache.”
“You don’t seem to mind it much, though, sir,” said Colin.
“No more I do,” answered the smith, with a blow that drove the anvil half way into the earth, from which it took him some trouble to drag it out again. “But I want to know what she is after now.”
So Colin told him all he knew about it, which was merely his own story.
“I see, I see,” said the smith. “It’s all moonshine; but we must do as she says notwithstanding. And now it is my turn to give you a lift, for you have worked well.—As soon as you leave the smithy, go straight to Stonestarvit Moss. Get on the highest part of it; make a circle three yards across, and dig a trench round it. I will give you a spade. At the end of the first day you will see a vine break the earth. By the end of the second, it will be creeping all over the circle. And by the end of the third day, the grapes will be ripe. Squeeze them one by one into a bottle—I will give you a bottle—till it is full. Cork it up tight, and by the time the queen comes for it, it will be Carasoyn.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” cried Colin. “When am I to go?”
“As soon as the boys have lifted Cumberbone Crag, and bored the flue under the Moss. It is of no use till then.”
“Well, I’ll go on with my work,” said Colin, and struck away at the anvil.
In a minute or two in came the same goblin whose head his father had hammered, and said, respectfully,
“It’s all right, sir. The boys are gathering their tools, and will be home to supper directly.”
“Are you sure you have lifted the Crag a yard?” said the smith.
“Slumkin says it’s a half inch over the yard. Grungle says it’s threequarters. But that won’t matter—will it?”
“No. I dare say not. But it is much better to be accurate. Is the flue done?”
“Yes, we managed that partly in lifting the crag.”
“Very well. How’s your head?”
“It rings a little.”
“Let it ring you a lesson, then, Slobberkin, in future.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, master, you may go when you like,” said the smith to Colin. “We’ve nothing here you can eat, I am sorry to say.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that. I’m not very hungry. But the old woman with the spindle said I was to work three days without dreaming.”
“Well, you haven’t been dreaming—have you?”
And the smith looked quite furious as he put the question, lifting his forehammer as if he would serve Colin like Slobberkin.
“No, that I haven’t,” answered Colin. “You took good care of that, sir.”
The smith actually smiled.
“Then go along,” he said. “It is all right.”
“But I’ve only worked—–”
“Three whole days and nights,” interrupted the smith. “Get along with you. The boys will bother you if you don’t. Here’s your spade and here’s your bottle.”
CHAPTER V
THE MOSS VINEYARD
Colin did not need a hint more, but was out of the smithy in a moment. He turned, however, to ask the way: there was nothing in sight but a great heap of peats which had been dug out of the moss, and was standing there to dry. Could he be on Stonestarvit Moss already? The sun was just setting. He would look out for the highest point at once. So he kept climbing, and at last reached a spot whence he could see all round him for a long way. Surely that must be Cumberbone Crag looking down on him! And there at his feet lay one of Jenny’s eggs, as bright as silver. And there was a little path trodden and scratched by Jenny’s feet, inclosing a circle just the size the smith had told him to make. He set to work at once, ate Jenny’s egg, and then dug the trench.
Those three days were the happiest he had ever known. For he understood everything he did himself, and all that everything was doing round about him. He saw what the rushes were, and why the blossom came out at the side, and why it was russet-coloured, and why the pith was white, and the skin green. And he said to himself, “If I were a rush now, that’s just how I should make a point of growing.” And he knew how the heather felt with its cold roots, and its head of purple bells; and the wise-looking cotton-grass, which the old woman called her sheep, and the white beard of which she spun into thread. And he knew what she spun it for: namely, to weave it into lovely white cloth of which to make night gowns for all the good people that were like to die; for one with one of these nightgowns upon him never died, but was laid in a beautiful white bed, and the door was closed upon him, and no noise came near him, and he lay there, dreaming lovely cool dreams, till the world had turned round, and was ready for him to get up again and do something.
He felt the wind playing with every blade of grass in his charmed circle. He felt the rays of heat shooting up from the hot flue beneath the moss. He knew the moment when the vine was going to break from the earth, and he felt the juices gathering and flowing from the roots into the grapes. And all the time he seemed at home, tending the cow, or making his father’s supper, or reading a fairy tale as he sat waiting for him to come home.
At length the evening of the third day arrived. Colin squeezed the rich red grapes into his bottle, corked it, shouldered his spade, and turned homewards, guided by a peak which he knew in the distance. After walking all night in the moonlight, he came at length upon a place which he recognized, and so down upon the brook, which he followed home.
He met his father going out with his sheep. Great was his delight to see Colin again, for he had been dreadfully anxious about him. Colin told him the whole story; and as at that time marvels were much easier to believe than they are now, Colin’s father did not laugh at him, but went away to the hills thinking, while Colin went on to the cottage, where he found plenty to do, having been nine days gone. He laid the bottle carefully away with his Sunday clothes, and set about everything just as usual.
But though the fairy brook was running merrily as ever through the cottage, and although Colin watched late every night, and latest when the moon shone, no fairy fleet came glimmering and dancing in along the stream. Autumn was there at length, and cold fogs began to rise in the cottage, and so Colin turned the brook into its old course, and filled up the breaches in the walls and the channel along the floor, making all close against the blasts of winter. But he had never known such a weary winter before. He could not help constantly thinking how cold the little girl must be, and how she would be saying to her self, “I wish Colin hadn’t been so silly and lost me.”
CHAPTER VI
THE CONSEQUENCES
But at last the spring came, and after the spring the summer. And the very first warm day, Colin took his spade and pickaxe, and down rushed the stream once more, singing and bounding into the cottage. Colin was even more delighted than he had been the first time. And he watched late into the night, but there came neither moon nor fairy fleet. And more than a week passed thus.
At length, on the ninth night, Colin, who had just fallen asleep, opened his eyes with sudden wakefulness, and behold! the room was all in a glimmer with moonshine and fairy glitter. The boats were rocking on the water, and the queen and her court had landed, and were dancing merrily on the earthen floor. He lost no time.
“Queen! queen!” he said, “I’ve got your bottle of Carasoyn.”
The dance ceased in a moment, and the queen bounded upon the edge of his bed.
“I can’t bear the look of your great, glaring, ugly eyes,” she said. “I must make you less before I can talk to you.”
So once more she laid her rush wand across his eyes, whereupon Colin saw them all six times the size they were before, and the queen went on:
“Where is the Carasoyn? Give it me.”
“It is in my box under the bed. If your majesty will stand out of the way, I will get it for you.”
The queen jumped on the floor, and Colin, leaning from the bed, pulled out his little box, and got out the bottle.
“There it is, your majesty,” he said, but not offering it to her.
“Give it me directly,” said the queen, holding out her hand.
“First give me my little girl,” returned Colin, boldly.
“Do you dare to bargain with me?” said the queen, angrily.
“Your majesty deigned to bargain with me first,” said Colin.
“But since then you tried to break all our necks. You made a wicked cataract out there on the other side of the garden. Our boats were all dashed to pieces, and we had to wait till our horses were fetched. If I had been killed, you couldn’t have held me to my bargain, and I won’t hold to it now.”
“If you chose to go down my cataract—–” began Colin.
“Your cataract!” cried the queen. “All the waters that run from Loch Lonely are mine, I can tell you—all the way to the sea.”10
“Except where they run through farmyards, your majesty.”
“I’ll rout you out of the country,” said the queen.
“Meantime I’ll put the bottle in the chest again,” returned Colin.
The queen bit her lips with vexation.
“Come here, Changeling,” she cried at length, in a flattering tone.11
And the little girl came slowly up to her, and stood staring at Colin, with the tears in her eyes.
“Give me your hand, little girl,” said he, holding out his.
She did so. It was cold as ice.
“Let go her hand,” said the queen.
“I won’t,” said Colin. “She’s mine.”
“Give me the bottle then,” said the queen.
“Don’t,” said the child.
But it was too late. The queen had it.
“Keep your girl,” she cried, with an ugly laugh.
“Yes, keep me,” cried the child.
The cry ended in a hiss.
Colin felt something slimy wriggling in his grasp, and looking down, saw that instead of a little girl he was holding a great writhing worm. He had almost flung it from him, but recovering himself, he grasped it tighter.
“If it’s a snake, I’ll choke it,” he said. “If it’s a girl, I’ll keep her.”
The same instant it changed to a little white rabbit, which looked him piteously in the face, and pulled to get its little forefoot out of his hand. But, though he tried not to hurt it, Colin would not let it go. Then the rabbit changed to a great black cat, with eyes that flashed green fire. She sputtered and spit and swelled her tail, but all to no purpose. Colin held fast. Then it was a wood pigeon, struggling and fluttering in terror to get its wing out of his hold. But Colin still held fast.
All this time the queen had been getting the cork out. The moment it yielded she gave a scream and dropped the bottle. The Carasoyn ran out, and a strange odour filled the cottage. The queen stood shivering and sobbing beside the bottle, and all her court came about her and shivered and sobbed too, and their faces grew ancient and wrinkled. Then the queen, bending and tottering like an old woman, led the way to the boats, and her courtiers followed her, limping and creeping and distorted. Colin stared in amazement. He saw them all go aboard, and he heard the sound of them like a far-off company of men and women crying bitterly. And away they floated down the stream, the rowers dipping no oar, but bending weeping over them, and letting the boats drift along the stream. They vanished from his sight, and the rush of the cataract came up on the night-wind louder than he had ever heard it before.—But alas! when he came to himself, he found his hand relaxed, and the dove flown. Once more there was nothing left but to cry himself asleep, as he well might.
In the morning he rose very wretched. But the moment he entered the cowhouse, there, beside the cow, on the milking stool, sat a lovely little girl, with just one white garment on her, crying bitterly.
“I am so cold,” she said, sobbing.
He caught her up, ran with her into the house, put her into the bed, and ran back to the cow for a bowl of warm milk. This she drank eagerly, laid her head down, and fell fast asleep. Then Colin saw that though she must be eight years old by her own account, her face was scarcely older than that of a baby of as many months.
When his father came home you may be sure he stared to see the child in the bed. Colin told him what had happened. But his father said he had met a troop of gipsies on the hill that morning.
“And you were always a dreamer, Colin, even before you could speak.”
“But don’t you smell the Carasoyn still?” said Colin.
“I do smell something very pleasant, to be sure,” returned his father; “but I think it is the wall-flower on the top of the garden-wall. What a blossom there is of it this year! I am sure there is nothing sweeter in all Fairyland, Colin.”
Colin allowed that.
The little girl slept for three whole days. And for three days more she never said another word than “I am so cold!” But after that she began to revive a little, and to take notice of things about her. For three weeks she would taste nothing but milk warm from the cow, and would not move from the chimney-corner. By degrees, however, she began to help Colin a little with his house-work, and as she did so, her face gathered more and more expression; and she made such progress, that by the end of three months she could do everything as well as Colin himself, and certainly more neatly. Whereupon he gave up his duties to her, and went out with his father to learn the calling of a shepherd.
Thus things went on for three years. And Fairy, as they called her, grew lovelier every day, and looked up to Colin more and more every day.
At the end of the three years, his father sent him to an old friend of his, a schoolmaster. Before he left, he made Fairy promise never to go near the brook after sundown. He had turned it into its old channel the very day she came to them. And he begged his father especially to look after her when the moon was high, for then she grew very restless and strange, and her eyes looked as if she saw things other people could not see.
When the end of the other three years had come, the schoolmaster would not let Colin go home, but insisted on sending him to college. And there he remained for three years more.
When he returned at the end of that time, he found Fairy so beautiful and so wise, that he fell dreadfully in love with her. And Fairy found out that she had been in love with him since ever so long—she did not know how long. And Colin’s father agreed that they should be married as soon as Colin should have a house to take her to. So Colin went away to London, and worked very hard, till at last he managed to get a little cottage in Devonshire to live in. Then he went back to Scotland and married Fairy. And he was very glad to get her away from the neighbourhood of a queen who was not to be depended upon.
CHAPTER VII
THE BANISHED FAIRIES
Those fairies had for a long time been doing wicked things. They had played many ill-natured pranks upon the human mortals; had stolen children upon whom they had no claim; had refused to deliver them up when they were demanded of them; had even terrified infants in their cradles; and, final proof of moral declension in fairies, had attempted to get rid of the obligations of their word, by all kinds of trickery and false logic.
It was not till they had sunk thus low that their queen began to long for the Carasoyn. She, no more than if she had been a daughter of Adam, could be happy while going on in that way; and, therefore, having heard of its marvellous virtues, and thinking it would stop her growing misery, she tried hard to procure it. For a hundred years she had tried in vain. Not till Colin arose did she succeed. But the Carasoyn was only for really good people, and therefore when the iron bottle which contained it was uncorked, she, and all her attendants were, by the vapours thereof, suddenly changed into old men and women fairies. They crowded away weeping and lamenting, and Colin had as yet seen them no more.
For when the wickedness of any fairy tribe reaches its climax, the punishment that falls upon them is, that they are compelled to leave that part of the country where they and their ancestors have lived for more years than they can count, and wander away, driven by an inward restlessness, ever longing after the country they have left, but never able to turn round and go back to it, always thinking they will do so to-morrow, but when to-morrow comes, saying to-morrow again, till at last they find, not their old home, but the place of their doom—that is, a place where their restlessness leaves them, and they find they can remain. This partial repose, however, springs from no satisfaction with the place; it is only that their inward doom ceases to drive them further. They sit down to weep, and to long after the country they have left.
This is not because the country to which they have been driven is ugly and inclement—it may or may not be such: it is simply because it is not their country. If it would be, and it must be, torture to the fairy of a harebell to go and live in a hyacinth—a torture quite analogous to which many human beings undergo from their birth to their death, and some of them longer, for anything I can tell—think what it must be for a tribe of fairies to have to go and live in a country quite different from that in and for which they were born. To the whole tribe the country is what the flower is to the individual; and when a fairy is born to whom the whole country is what the individual flower is to the individual fairy, then the fairy is king or queen of the fairies, and always makes a new nursery rhyme for the young fairies, which is never forgotten. When, therefore, a tribe is banished, it is long before they can settle themselves into their new quarters. Their clothes do not fit them, as it were. They are constantly wriggling themselves into harmony with their new circumstances—which is only another word for clothes—and never quite succeeding. It is their punishment—and something more. Consequently their temper is not always of the even-est; indeed, and in a word, they are as like human mortals as may well be, considering the differences between them.
In the present case, you would say it was surely no great hardship to be banished from the healthy hills, the bare rocks, the wee trotting burnies of Scotland, to the rich valleys, the wooded shores, the great rivers, the grand ocean of the south of Devon.12 You may say they could not have been very wicked when this was all their punishment. If you do, you must have studied the human mortals to no great purpose. You do not believe that a man may be punished by being made very rich? I do. Anyhow, these fairies were not of your opinion, for they were in it. In the splendour of their Devon banishment, they sighed for their bare Scotland. Under the leafy foliage of the Devonshire valleys, with the purple and green ocean before them, that had seen ships of a thousand builds, or on the shore rich with shells and many-coloured creatures, they longed for the clear, cold, pensive, open sides of the far-stretching heathy sweeps to which a gray, wild, torn sea, with memories only of Norsemen, whales, and mermaids, cried aloud. For the big rivers, on which reposed great old hulks scarred with battle, they longed after the rocks and stones and rowan and birch-trees of the solitary burns. The country they had left might be an ill-favoured thing, but it was their own.13
Now that which happens to the aspect of a country when the fairies leave it, is that a kind of deadness falls over the landscape. The traveller feels the wind as before, but it does not seem to refresh him. The child sighs over his daisy chain, and cannot find a red-tipped one amongst all that he has gathered. The cowslips have not half the honey in them. The wasps outnumber the bees. The horses come from the plough more tired at night, hanging their heads to their very hoofs as they plod homewards. The youth and the maiden, though perfectly happy when they meet, find the road to and from the trysting-place unaccountably long and dreary. The hawthorn-blossom is neither so white nor so red as it used to be, and the dark rough bark looks through and makes it ragged. The day is neither so warm nor the night so friendly as before. In a word, that something which no one can either describe or be content to go without is missing. Everything is common-place. Everything falls short of one’s expectations.
But it does not follow that the country to which the fairies are banished is so much richer and more beautiful for their presence. If that country has its own fairies, it needs no more, and Devon in especial has been rich in fairies from the time of the Phoenicians, and ever so long before that. But supposing there were no aborigines left to quarrel with, it takes centuries before the new immigration can fit itself into its new home. Until this comes about, the queerest things are constantly happening. For however could a convolvulus grow right with the soul of a Canterbury-bell inside it, for instance? The banished fairies are forced to do the best they can, and take the flowers the nearest they can find.
CHAPTER VIII
THEIR REVENGE
When Colin and his wife settled then in their farm-house, the same tribe of fairies was already in the neighbourhood, and was not long in discovering who had come after them. An assembly was immediately called. Something must be done; but what, was disputed. Most of them thought only of revenge—to be taken upon the children. But the queen hesitated. Perhaps her sufferings had done her good. She suggested that before coming to any conclusion they should wait and watch the household.
In consequence of this resolution they began to frequent the house constantly, and sometimes in great numbers. But for a long time they could do the children no mischief. Whatever they tried turned out to their amusement. They were three, two girls and a boy; the girls nine and eight, and the boy three years old.
When they succeeded in enticing them beyond the home-boundaries, they would at one time be seized with an unaccountable panic, and turn and scurry home without knowing why; at another, a great butterfly or dragon fly, or some other winged and lovely creature, would dart past them, and away towards the house, and they after it, scampering; or the voice of their mother would be heard calling from the door. But at last their opportunity arrived.
One day the children were having such a game! The sisters had blindfolded their little brother, and were carrying him now on their backs, now in their arms, all about the place; now up stairs, talking about the rugged mountain paths they were climbing; now down again, filling him with the fancy that they were descending into a narrow valley; then they would set the tap of a rain-water barrel running, and represent that they were travelling along the bank of a rivulet. Now they were threading the depths of a great forest: and when the low of a cow reached them from a nigh field, that was the roaring of a lion or a tiger. At length they reached a lake into which the rivulet ran, and then it was necessary to take off his shoes and socks, that he might skim over the water on his bare feet, which they dipped and dabbled now in this tub, now in that, standing for farm and household purposes by the water-butt. The sisters kept their own imaginations alive by carrying him through all the strange places inside and outside of the house. When they told him they were ascending a precipice, they were, in fact, climbing a rather difficult ladder up to the door of the hay-loft; when they told him they were traversing a pathless desert, they were, in fact, in a waste, empty place, a wide floor, used sometimes as a granary, with the rafters of the roof coming down to it on both sides, a place abundantly potent in their feelings to the generation of the desert in his; when they were wandering through a trackless forest, they were, in fact, winding about amongst the trees of a large orchard, which, in the moonlight, was vast enough for the fancy of any child. Had they uncovered his eyes at any moment, he would only have been seized with a wonder and awe of another sort, more overwhelming because more real, and more strange because not even in part bodied forth from his own brain.
In the course of the story, and while they bore the bare-footed child through the orchard, telling him they saw the fairies gliding about everywhere through the trees, not thinking that he believed every word they told him, they set him down, and the child suddenly opened his eyes. His sisters were gone. The moon was staring at him out of the sky, through the mossy branches of the apple-trees, which he thought looked like old women all about him, they were so thin and bony.
When the sisters, who had only for a moment run behind some of the trees, that they might cause him additional amazement, returned, he was gone. There was terrible lamentation in the house; but his father and mother, who were experienced in such matters, knew that the fairies must be in it, and cherished a hope that their son would yet be restored to them, though all their endeavours to find him were unavailing.
CHAPTER IX
THE FAIRY-FIDDLER
The father thought over many plans, but never came upon the right one. He did not know that they were the same tribe which had before carried away his wife when she was an infant. If he had, they might have done something sooner.
At length, one night, towards the close of seven years, about twelve o’clock, Colin suddenly opened his eyes, for he had been fast asleep and dreaming, and saw a few grotesque figures which he thought he must have seen before, dancing on the floor between him and the nearly extinguished fire. One of them had a violin, but when Colin first saw him he was not playing. Another of them was singing, and thus keeping the dance in time. This was what he sang, evidently addressed to the fiddler, who stood in the centre of the dance:—
“Peterkin, Peterkin, tall and thin.
What have you done with his cheek and his chin?
What have you done with his ear and his eye?
Hearken, hearken, and hear him cry.”
Here Peterkin put his fiddle to his neck, and drew from it a wail just like the cry of a child, at which the dancers danced more furiously. Then he went on playing the tune the other had just sung, in accompaniment to his own reply:—
“Silversnout, Silversnout, short and stout,
I have cut them off and plucked them out,
And salted them down in the Kelpie’s Pool,
Because papa Colin is such a fool.”14
Then the fiddle cried like a child again, and they danced more wildly than ever.
Colin, filled with horror, although he did not more than half believe what they were saying, sat up in bed and stared at them with fierce eyes, waiting to hear what they would say next. Silversnout now resumed his part:—
“Ho, ho! Ho! ho! and if he don’t know,
And fish them out of the pool, so—so,”—
here they all pretended to be hauling in a net as they danced.
“Before the end of the seven long years,
Sweet babe will be left without eyes or ears.”
Then Peterkin replied:—
“Sweet babe will be left without cheek or chin,
Only a hole to put porridge in;
Porridge and milk, and haggis, and cakes:
Sweet babe will gobble till his stomach aches.”
From this last verse, Colin knew that they must be Scotch fairies, and all at once recollected their figures as belonging to the multitude he had once seen frolicking in his father’s cottage. It was now Silversnout’s turn. He began:—
“But never more shall Colin see
Sweet babe again upon his knee,
With or without his cheek or chin,
Except—”
Here Silversnout caught sight of Colin’s face staring at him from the bed, and with a shriek of laughter they all vanished, the tones of Peterkin’s fiddle trailing after them through the darkness like the train of a shooting star.
CHAPTER X
THE OLD WOMAN AND HER HEN
Now Colin had got the better of these fairies once, not by his own skill, but by the help that other powers had afforded him. What were those powers? First the old woman on the heath. Indeed, he might attribute it all to her. He would go back to Scotland and look for her and find her. But the old woman was never found except by the seeker losing himself. It could not be done otherwise. She would cease to be the old woman, and become her own hen, if ever the moment arrived when any one found her without losing himself. And Colin since that time had wandered so much all over the moor, wide as it was, that lay above his father’s cottage, that he did not believe he was able to lose himself there any more. He had yet to learn that it did not so much matter where he lost himself, provided only he was lost.
Just at this time Colin’s purse was nearly empty, and he set out to borrow the money of a friend who lived on the other side of Dart-moor.15 When he got there, he found that he had gone from home. Unable to rest, he set out again to return.
It was almost night when he started, and before he had got many miles into the moor, it was dark, for there was no moon, and it was so cloudy that he could not see the stars. He thought he knew the way quite well, but as the track even in daylight was in certain places very indistinct, it was no wonder that he strayed from it, and found that he had lost himself. The same moment that he became aware of this, he saw a light away to the left. He turned towards it and found it proceeded from a little hive-like hut, the door of which stood open. When he was within a yard or two of it, he heard a voice say—
“Come in, Colin; I’m waiting for you.”
Colin obeyed at once, and found the old woman seated with her spindle and distaff, just as he had seen her when he was a boy on the moor above his father’s cottage.
“How do you do, mother?” he said.
“I am always quite well. Never ask me that question.”
“Well, then, I won’t any more,” returned Colin. “But I thought you lived in Scotland?”
“I don’t live anywhere; but those that will do as I tell them, will always find me when they want me.”
“Do you see yet, mother?”
“See! I always see so well that it is not worth while to burn eyelight. So I let them go out. They were expensive.”
Where her eyes should have been, there was nothing but wrinkles.
“What do you want?” she resumed.
“I want my child. The fairies have got him.”
“I know that.”
“And they have taken out his eyes.”
“I can make him see without them.”
“And they’ve cut off his ears,” said Colin.
“He can hear without them.”
“And they’ve salted down his cheek and his chin.”
“Now I don’t believe that,” said the old woman.
“I heard them say so myself,” returned Colin.
“Those fairies are worse liars than any I know. But something must be done. Sit down and I’ll tell you a story.”
“There’s only nine days of the seven years left,” said Colin, in a tone of expostulation.
“I know that as well as you,” answered the old woman. “Therefore, I say, there is no time to be lost. Sit down and listen to my story. Here, Jenny.”
The hen came pacing solemnly out from under the bed.
“Off to the sheep-shearing, Jenny, and make haste, for I must spin faster than usual. There are but nine days left.”
Jenny ran out at the door with her head on a level with her tail, as if the kite had been after her. In a few moments she returned with a bunch of wool, as they called it, though it was only cotton from the cotton-grass that grew all about the cottage, nearly as big as herself, in her bill, and then darted away for more. The old woman fastened it on her distaff, drew out a thread to her spindle, and then began to spin. And as she spun she told her story—fast, fast; and Jenny kept scampering out and in; and by the time Colin thought it must be midnight, the story was told, and seven of the nine days were over.
“Colin,” said the old woman, “now that you know all about it, you must set off at once.”
“I am ready,” answered Colin, rising.
“Keep on the road Jenny will show you till you come to the cobbler’s. Tell him the old woman with the distaff requests him to give you a lump of his wax.”
“And what am I to do with it?”
“The cobbler always knows what his wax is for.”
And with this answer, the old woman turned her face towards the fire, for, although it was summer, it was cold at night on the moor. Colin, moved by sudden curiosity, instead of walking out of the hut after Jenny, as he ought to have done, crept round by the wall, and peeped in the old woman’s face. There, instead of wrinkled blindness, he saw a pair of flashing orbs of light, which were rather reflected on the fire than had the fire reflected in them. But the same instant the hut and all that was in it vanished, he felt the cold fog of the moor blowing upon him, and fell heavily to the earth.
CHAPTER XI
THE GOBLIN COBBLER
When he came to himself he lay on the moor still. He got up and gazed around. The moon was up, but there was no hut to be seen. He was sorry enough now that he had been so foolish. He called, “Jenny, Jenny,” but in vain. What was he to do? To-morrow was the eighth of the nine days left, and if before twelve at night the following day he had not rescued his boy, nothing could be done, at least for seven years more. True, the year was not quite out till about seven the following evening, but the fairies instead of giving days of grace, always take them. He could do nothing but begin to walk, simply because that gave him a shadow more of a chance of finding the cobbler’s than if he sat still, but there was no possibility of choosing one direction rather than another.
He wandered the rest of that night and the next day. He could not go home before the hour when the cobbler could no longer help him. Such was his anxiety, that although he neither ate nor drank, he never thought of the cause of his gathering weakness.
As it grew dark, however, he became painfully aware of it, and was just on the point of sitting down exhausted upon a great white stone that looked inviting, when he saw a faint glimmering in front of him. He was erect in a moment, and making towards the place. As he drew near he became aware of a noise made up of many smaller noises, such as might have proceeded from some kind of factory. Not till he was close to the place could he see that it was a long low hut, with one door, and no windows. The light shone from the door, which stood wide open. He approached, and peeped in. There sat a multitude of cobblers, each on his stool, with his candle stuck in the hole in the seat, cobbling away. They looked rather little men, though not at all of fairy-size. The most remarkable thing about them was, that at any given moment they were all doing precisely the same thing, as if they had been a piece of machinery. When one drew the threads in stitching, they all did the same. If Colin saw one wax his thread, and looked up, he saw that they were all waxing their thread. If one took to hammering on his lapstone, they did not follow his example, but all together with him they caught up their lapstones and fell to hammering away, as if nothing but hammering could ever be demanded of them. And when he came to look at them more closely, he saw that every one was blind of an eye, and had a nose turned up like an awl. Everyone of them, however, looked different from the rest, notwithstanding a very close resemblance in their features.
The moment they caught sight of him, they rose as one man, pointed their awls at him, and advanced towards him like a closing bush of aloes, glittering with spikes.
“Fine upper-leathers,” said one and all, with a variety of accordant grimaces.
“Top of his head—good paste-bowl,” was the next general remark.
“Coarse hair—good ends,” followed.
“Sinews—good thread.”
“Bones and blood—good paste for seven-leaguers.”
“Ears—good loops to pull ‘em on with. Pair short now.”
“Soles—same for queen’s slippers.”
And so on they went, portioning out his body in the most irreverent fashion for the uses of their trade, till having come to his teeth, and said—
“Teeth—good brads,”—they all gave a shriek like the whisk of the waxed threads through the leather, and sprung upon him with their awls drawn back like daggers. There was no time to lose.
“The old woman with the spindle—–” said Colin.
“Don’t know her,” shrieked the cobblers.
“The old woman with the distaff,” said Colin, and they all scurried back to their seats and fell to hammering vigorously.
“She desired me,” continued Colin, “to ask the cobbler for a lump of his wax.”
Every one of them caught up his lump of wrought rosin, and held it out to Colin. He took the one offered by the nearest, and found that all their lumps were gone; after which they sat motionless and stared at him.
“But what am I to do with it?” asked Colin.
“I will walk a little way with you,” said the one nearest, “and tell you all about it. The old woman is my grandmother, and a very worthy old soul she is.”
Colin stepped out at the door of the workshop, and the cobbler followed him. Looking round, Colin saw all the stools vacant, and the place as still as an old churchyard. The cobbler, who now in his talk, gestures, and general demeanour, appeared a very respectable, not to say conventional, little man, proceeded to give him all the information he required, accompanying it with the present of one of his favourite awls.
They walked a long way, till Colin was amazed to find that his strength stood out so well. But at length the cobbler said—
“I see, sir, that the sun is at hand. I must return to my vocation. When the sun is once up you will know where you are.”
He turned aside a few yards from the path, and entered the open door of a cottage. In a moment the place resounded with the soft hammering of three hundred and thirteen cobblers, each with his candle stuck in a hole in the stool on which he sat. While Colin stood gazing in wonderment, the rim of the sun crept up above the horizon; and there the cottage stood white and sleeping, while the cobblers, their lights, their stools, and their tools had all vanished. Only there was still the sound of the hammers ringing in his head, where it seemed to shape itself into words something like these: a good deal had to give way to the rhyme, for they were more particular about their rhymes than their etymology:
Cobbler’s man
Hammer it, stitch it,
As fast as you can.
The week-day ogre
Is wanting his boots;
The trip-a-trap fairy
Is going bare-foots.
Dream-daughter has worn out
Her heels and her toeses,
For want of cork slippers
To walk over noses.
Spark-eye, the smith,
May shoe the nightmare,
The kelpie and pookie,
The nine-footed bear:
We shoe the mermaids—
The tips of their tails—
Stitching the leather16
On to their scales.
We shoe the brownie,
Clumsy and toeless,
And then he goes quiet
As a mole or a moless.
There is but one creature
That we cannot shoe,
And that is the Boneless,17
All made of glue.”
A great deal of nonsense of this sort went through Colin’s head before the sounds died away. Then he found himself standing in the field outside his own orchard.
CHAPTER XII
THE WAX AND THE AWL
The evening arrived. The sun was going down over the sea, cloudless, casting gold from him lavishly, when Colin arrived on the shore at some distance from his home. The tide was falling, and a good space of sand was uncovered, and lay glittering in the setting sun. This sand lay between some rocks and the sea; and from the rocks innumerable runnels of water that had been left behind in their hollows were hurrying back to their mother. These occasionally spread into little shallow lakes, resting in hollows in the sand. These lakes were in a constant ripple from the flow of the little streams through them; and the sun shining on these multitudinous ripples, the sand at the bottom shone like brown silk watered with gold, only that the golden lines were flitting about like living things, never for a moment in one place.
Now Colin had no need of fairy ointment to anoint his eyes and make him able to see fairies. Most people need this; but Colin was naturally gifted. Therefore, as he drew near a certain high rock, which he knew very well, and from which many streams were flowing back into the sea, he saw that the little lakes about it were crowded with fairies, playing all kinds of pranks in the water. It was a lovely sight to see them thus frolicking in the light of the setting sun, in their gay dresses, sparkling with jewels, or what looked like jewels, flashing all colours as they moved. But Colin had not much time to see them; for the moment they saw him, knowing that this was the man whom they had wronged by stealing his child, and knowing too that he saw them, they fled at once up the high rock and vanished. This was just what Colin wanted. He went all round and round the rock, looked in every direction in which there might be a pool, found more fairies, here and there, who fled like the first up the rock and disappeared. When he had thus driven them all from the sands, he approached the rock, taking the lump of cobbler’s wax from his pocket as he went. He scrambled up the rock, and, without showing his face, put his hand on the uppermost edge of it, and began drawing a line with the wax all along. He went creeping round the rock, still drawing the wax along the edge, till he had completed the circuit. Then he peeped over.
Now in the heart of this rock, which was nearly covered at highwater, there was a big basin, known as the Kelpie’s Pool, filled with sea-water and the loveliest sea-weed and many little sea-animals; and this was a favourite resort of the fairies. It was now, of course, crowded. When they saw his big head come peeping over, they burst into a loud fit of laughter, and began mocking him and making game of him in a hundred ways. Some made the ugliest faces they could, some queer gestures of contempt; others sung bits of songs, and so on; while the queen sat by herself on a projecting corner of the rock, with her feet in the water, and looked at him sulkily. Many of them kept on plunging and swimming and diving and floating, while they mocked him; and Colin would have enjoyed the sight much if they had not spoiled their beauty and their motions by their grimaces and their gestures.
“I want my child,” said Colin.
“Give him his child,” cried one.
Thereupon a dozen of them dived, and brought up a huge seaslug—a horrid creature, like a lump of blubber—and held it up to him, saying—
“There he is; come down and fetch him.”
Others offered him a blue lobster, struggling in their grasp; others, a spider-crab; others, a whelk; while some of them sung mocking verses, each capping the line the other gave. At length they lifted a dreadful object from the bottom. It was like a baby with his face half eaten away by the fishes, only that he had a huge nose, like the big toe of a lobster. But Colin was not to be taken in.
“Very well, good people,” he said, “I will try something else.”
He crept down the rock again, took out the little cobbler’s awl, and began boring a hole. It went through the rock as if it had been butter, and as he drew it out the water followed in a far-reaching spout. He bored another, and went on boring till there were three hundred and thirteen spouts gushing from the rock, and running away in a strong little stream towards the sea. He then sat down on a ledge at the foot of the rock and waited.
By-and-by he heard a clamour of little voices from the basin. They had found that the water was getting very low. But when they discovered the holes by which it was escaping, “He’s got Dottlecob’s awl! He’s got Dottlecob’s awl!” they cried with one voice of horror. When he heard this, Colin climbed the rock again to enjoy their confusion. But here I must explain a little.
In the former part of this history I showed how fond these fairies were of water. But the fact was, they were far too fond of it. It had grown a thorough dissipation with them. Their business had been chiefly to tend and help the flowers in which they lived, and to do good offices for every thing that had any kind of life about them. Hence their name of Good People. But from finding the good the water did to the flowers, and from sharing in the refreshment it brought them, flowing up to them in tiny runnels through the veins of the plants, they had fallen in love with the water itself, for its own sake, or rather for the pleasure it gave to them, irrespective of the good it was to the flowers which lived upon it. So they neglected their business, and took to sailing on the streams, and plunging into every pool they could find. Hence the rapidity of their decline and fall.
Again, on coming to the sea-coast, they had found that the salt water did much to restore the beauty they had lost by partaking of the Carasoyn. Therefore they were constantly on the shore, bathing for ever in the water, especially that left in this pool by the ebbing tide, which was particularly to their taste; till at last they had grown entirely dependent for comfort on the sea-water, and, they thought, entirely dependent on it for existence also, at least such existence as was in the least worth possessing.
Therefore when they saw the big face of Colin peering once more over the ledge, they rushed at him in a rage, scrambling up the side of the rock like so many mad beetles. Colin drew back and let them come on. The moment the foremost put his foot on the line that Colin had drawn around the rock, he slipped and tumbled backwards head over heels into the pool, shrieking—
“He’s got Dottlecob’s wax!”
“He’s got Dottlecob’s wax!” screamed the next, as he fell backwards after his companion, and this took place till no one would approach the line. In fact no fairy could keep his footing on the wax, and the line was so broad—for as Colin rubbed it, it had melted and spread—that not one of them could spring over it. The queen now rose.
“What do you want, Colin?” she said.
“I want my child, as you know very well,” answered Colin.
“Come and take him,” returned the queen, and sat down again, not now with her feet in the water, for it was much too low for that.
But Colin knew better. He sat down on the edge of the basin. Unfortunately, the tail of his coat crossed the line. In a moment half-a-dozen of the fairies were out of the circle. Colin rose instantly, and there was not much harm done, for the multitude was still in prison. The water was nearly gone, beginning to leave the very roots of the long tangles uncovered. At length the queen could bear it no longer.
“Look here, Colin,” she said; “I wish you well.”
And as she spoke she rose and descended the side of the rock towards the water now far below her. She had to be very cautious too, the stones were so slippery, though there was none of Dottlecob’s wax there. About half-way below where the surface of the pool had been, she stopped, and pushed a stone aside. Colin saw what seemed the entrance to a cave inside the rock. The queen went in. A few moments after she came out wringing her hands.
“Oh dear! oh dear! What shall I do?” she cried. “You horrid thick people will grow so He’s grown to such a size that I can’t get him out.”
“Will you let him go if I get him out?” asked Colin.
“I will, I will. We shall all be starved to death for want of sea-water if I don’t,” she answered.
“Swear by the cobbler’s awl and the cobbler’s wax,” said Colin.
“I swear,” said the queen.
“By the cobbler’s awl and the cobbler’s wax,” insisted Colin.
“I swear by the cobbler’s awl and the cobbler’s wax,” returned the queen.
“In the name of your people?”
“In the name of my people,” said the queen, “that none of us here present will ever annoy you or your family hereafter.”
“Then I’ll come down,” said Colin, and jumped into the basin. With the cobbler’s awl he soon cleared a big opening into the rock, for it bored and cut it like butter. Then out crept a beautiful boy of about ten years old, into his father’s arms, with eyes, and ears, and chin, and cheek all safe and sound. And he carried him home to his mother.
It was a disappointment to find him so much of a baby at his age; but that fault soon began to mend. And the house was full of jubilation. And little Colin told them the whole story of his sojourn among the fairies. And it did not take so long as you would think, for he fancied he had been there only about a week.