"It is the father himself," said Mary Ellen. The shoemaker seated himself on the big stone and drew his little daughters down beside him; but it was such an unusual thing for him to spare any time from his work that they sat awkwardly within the shelter of his arms, waiting for him to speak. Kathleen wondered how much of their talk he had heard, and whether he would scold her for listening to old Granny Connor, and repeating the tales to her little sister. She hung her head in silence, and Mary Ellen felt as if the sunshine had been darkened by a cloud; but the father's arms were around both little girls to hold them, although he did not speak for some time. "So you have been listening to old Granny Connor," he said at last. Kathleen stole a look into his face, which always had a kindly smile for everyone. "I did not mean any wrong," she said timidly. "I was only wanting to find some way to help Mary Ellen." "What would you be doing for Mary Ellen?" he asked. "I'd like to find some way to get money so that she might go to Dublin and have a doctor cure her eyes," said the child simply. "And so you put a dish of stirabout where the little old shoemaker might see it?" asked her father. Both the children nodded their heads. "How did you find out about the fairy dwarf?" "Great-grandmother Connell and Grandmother Barry talk about him in Gaelic. Sometimes Grandmother Barry tells us what they are saying," answered Kathleen. "And last night I asked old Granny Connor to tell me more." "What did she say?" asked her father. "She said that people call you the leprecaun of Donegal, because of the two rows of buttons in sevens on your green frieze coat." The shoemaker laughed. "And where do they think I keep my money?" he asked. "They say you have it hidden in a purse that can never grow empty, and that you keep it in the place where you mend your shoes," the child replied, looking away from her father and off across the bog to the purple mountains. "And no one knows where it is that you have your work-bench," she added with a sigh. "Look at me, Kathleen," said her father. The child turned her gray eyes up to his, gray and honest like her own. "Did you think when you put the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush last night, that you would see me take it up?" "Oh, no, no!" cried Kathleen. "Sure, I thought it would be the tiny man, himself, who would find it." "But it was myself who found it and took it away, when you were sound asleep in your bed," said her father. Kathleen jumped up in surprise, but Mary Ellen nodded her curly head, as if she knew all the time that it was not the fairy.