Poor Mary Ellen's blind eyes could see nothing of the shoemaker's bench and the empty purse, but her heart felt all the loving thought that moved her sister to ask, "Then why did you not leave the dish of stirabout under the hawthorn bush? The little elf shoemaker sits there every night mending his shoe, with his purse of gold beside him. Belike you might snatch it yourself." "Oh, Kathleen, it's myself will be the only shoemaker in these parts," her father answered. "Put the foolish fancies out of your head now. No good ever came of such thoughts." It was not the first time he had told Kathleen to forget the fairy lore, and he had often checked Grandmother Barry when her unruly tongue touched upon the forbidden subject. "The childer's heads should not be filled with such nonsense," he said. But it was not easy to check Great-grandmother Connell. She had lived ninety long years among a fairy-loving people, and liked to tell the Gaelic stories of old Ireland over and over again. She it was who believed that Ireland was first inhabited by a race of giants. "They lived here with the birds and beasts before ever a man rode through the green forests," she told Grandmother Barry. "What became of them, then?" inquired her daughter. "Sure, they turned themselves into the wee folk when men came here from over the seas, and they live under the rocks and trees and in the fairy mounds." "True it is," agreed Grandmother Barry, and she told Kathleen what the great-grandmother had been saying in Gaelic about the giants and fairies. That was how Kathleen came to know so many of the tales of old Ireland, and why she was always thinking of the wee folk. "How can I put the thoughts out of my head?" she asked her father. "Sure, the fairies are putting them in again all the time, with their doings." "What are they doing, the day, to make you think of them?" asked the shoemaker. "There's the ring of green grass beyond the hawthorn bush," she said timidly. "Danny borrowed the plow from Farmer Flynn and plowed through it over and over, but it came up again as round and green as ever. What else could make it but the fairies with their dancing feet?" The shoemaker shook his head hopelessly at the child's simple faith in her old grandmother's stories. "It's not like you, with your sense and handy ways about the house, to believe the fairy nonsense," he said. "It must be because you have never learned the reading. After this you must come up here when your work in the house is done, and I'll teach you the words. If you don't believe it from my telling, you will from the books, that there are no fairies in Ireland."