"You think you are very wise," she said, pausing the next moment to coax a bee to give her a sip of honey, "but mortal men are not a match for Fairy Folk. The Dwarfs, or Courils, who haunt the stone tables and curious mounds you find throughout this country, compel all travellers by night who come their way to dance with them, whether they will or no. They don't let them stop dancing until they drop to the ground, worn out with fatigue, and sometimes the poor creatures never regain their strength. Mère Gautier's husband danced with the Dwarfs when he was but eight-and-twenty, and he has not done a stroke of work from that day to this, though now he is eighty-five. Mère Gautier keeps the home together, and he sits by the fireside and tells the neighbours how the Dwarfs looked and what they said. The Curé declares that such idleness is sinful, and that he might work if he would; but one cannot be sure, and he makes himself out to be a very poor creature. The Gorics--tiny men but three feet high, though they have the strength of giants--are little better than Courils. Near Quiberon, by the sea shore, is a heap of huge stones, some say no less than four thousand in number, known as 'The House of the Gorics,' and every night the Dwarfs come out and dance round it till break of day. If they spy a belated traveller, even in the distance, they compel him to join them, just as the Courils do; and when he faints from sheer exhaustion they vanish in peals of laughter." "The Fairy I met in the South spoke of little men who gave away fairy gold," I said, trying not to let my voice sound sleepy. The sun was hot, though it was early spring, and there was a grasshopper just at my elbow who had been chirping a lullaby to her babies for the last half-hour. "If you shut your eyes you will see nothing!" the Wood-Elf pouted; and I knew that she had noticed my yawn. I sat up then, and told her how pretty I thought her frock, all brown and green, with a dainty girdle of silver. She laughed at this, and I coaxed her to tell me another story. It was one, she said, that had been sung in verse on the Welsh hills, for in ancient times the people of Wales and those of "Little Britain" were the closest friends. [Illustration] The Wee Men of Morlaix