"True," replied another, with a voice still more fearful, "our king would never have commanded his gnawing white-toothed waves to devour the rocky roots of the island cemetery, had not his daughter, Durfulla, been buried there by her mortal husband!" "But the time will come," said a third, bending over the coffin, "When mortal eye--our work shall spy, And mortal ear--our dirge shall hear." "Then," said a fourth, "our burial of the Cantillons is at an end for ever!" As this was spoken the coffin was borne from the beach by a retiring wave, and the company of sea people prepared to follow it; but at the moment one chanced to discover Connor Crowe, as fixed with wonder and as motionless with fear as the stone on which he sat. "The time is come," cried the unearthly being, "the time is come; a human eye looks on the forms of ocean, a human ear has heard their voices. Farewell to the Cantillons; the sons of the sea are no longer doomed to bury the dust of the earth!" One after the other turned slowly round, and regarded Connor Crowe, who still remained as if bound by a spell. Again arose their funeral song; and on the next wave they followed the coffin. The sound of the lamentation died away, and at length nothing was heard but the rush of waters. The coffin and the train of sea people sank over the old churchyard, and never since the funeral of old Flory Cantillon have any of the family been carried to the strand of Ballyheigh, for conveyance to their rightful burial-place, beneath the waves of the Atlantic. THE SOLITARY FAIRIES. LEPRACAUN. CLURICAUN. FAR DARRIG. "The name _Lepracaun_," Mr. Douglas Hyde writes to me, "is from the Irish _leith brog_--_i.e._, the One-shoemaker, since he is generally seen working at a single shoe. It is spelt in Irish _leith bhrogan_, or _leith phrogan_, and is in some places pronounced Luchryman, as O'Kearney writes it in that very rare book, the _Feis Tigh Chonain_." The _Lepracaun_, _Cluricaun_, and _Far Darrig_. Are these one spirit in different moods and shapes? Hardly two Irish writers are agreed. In many things these three fairies, if three, resemble each other. They are withered, old, and solitary, in every way unlike the sociable spirits of the first sections. They dress with all unfairy homeliness, and are, indeed, most sluttish, slouching, jeering, mischievous phantoms. They are the great practical jokers among the good people. The _Lepracaun_ makes shoes continually, and has grown very rich. Many treasure-crocks, buried of old in war-time, has he now for his own. In the early part of this century, according to Croker, in a newspaper office in Tipperary, they used to show a little shoe forgotten by a Lepracaun. The _Cluricaun_, (_Clobhair-ceann_, in O'Kearney) makes himself drunk in gentlemen's cellars. Some suppose he is merely the Lepracaun on a spree. He is almost unknown in Connaught and the north.