It is not pleasant to be robbed of a cherished belief. The awakening breaks upon the shores of romance as would a London fog on a Swiss lake; yet it must needs be said that under the critical eye of the expert the vision dissolved, and left but an Elizabethan pipe behind. For such, indeed, was the fate that befell the famous Celtic tumulus and pipe of Bannockstown in Kildare. Stories, fanciful and fairy-like, relating to small pipes found in Irish by-paths, are mentioned in Mr. Crofton Crocker’s _Fairy Legends of Ireland_. The peasant who picked up one of these always knew that it belonged to the Cluricaunes, ‘a set of disavin’ little devils,’ he would explain, ‘who were always playing their thricks on good Christians;’ and with a few words of choice brogue he would break it and throw the bits away. Ireland, however, does not stand alone in that legendary lore wherein pipes have played their little part in life’s romance. In Worcestershire there still lingers, or did linger until the scream of the locomotive startled the woods out of their sylvan dream, a fairy tale of Queen Mab having held her court at a spot near old Swinford, where a number of smoking-pipes had been found, so small that none other than fairy fingers could have made them for fairy mouths. So there grew up among the country folk gifted with a light fancy, the belief that Queen Mab had presided at her revels in the dell, distributing among her troop the fairy pipes they had found, while sighing on the breeze, Come away elves, while the dew is sweet, Come to the dingles where the fairies meet.