We commence our survey of the lands of Celts and Cymry with Ireland, as being the first in point of importance, but still more as being the land of our birth. It is pleasing to us, now in the autumn of our life, to return in imagination to where we passed its spring--its most happy spring. As we read and meditate, its mountains and its vales, its verdant fields and lucid streams, objects on which we probably never again shall gaze, rise up in their primal freshness and beauty before us, and we are once more present, buoyant with youth, in the scenes where we first heard the fairy-legends of which we are now to treat. Even the forms of the individual peasants who are associated with them in our memory, rise as it were from their humble resting-places and appear before us, again awaking our sympathies; for, we will boldly assert it, the Irish peasantry, with all their faults, gain a faster hold on the affections than the peasantry of any other country. We speak, however, particularly of them as they were in our county and in our younger days; for we fear that they are somewhat changed, and not for the better. But our present business is with the Irish fairies rather than with the Irish people. The fairies of Ireland can hardly be said to differ in any respect from those of England and Scotland. Like them they are of diminutive size, rarely exceeding two feet in height; they live also in society, their ordinary abode being the interior of the mounds, called in Irish, Raths (_Râhs_), in English, Moats, the construction of which is, by the peasantry, ascribed to the Danes from whom, it might thence perhaps be inferred, the Irish got their fairies direct and not _viâ_ England. From these abodes they are at times seen to issue mounted on diminutive steeds, in order to take at night the diversion of the chase. Their usual attire is green with red caps.[427] They are fond of music, but we do not in general hear much of their dancing, perhaps because on account of the infrequency of thunder, the fairy-rings are less numerous in Ireland than elsewhere. Though the fairies steal children and strike people with paralysis and other ailments (which is called being _fairy-struck_), and shoot their elf-arrows at the cattle, they are in general kind to those for whom they have contracted a liking, and often render them essential service in time of need. They can make themselves visible and invisible, and assume any forms they please. The pretty tiny conical mushrooms which grow so abundantly in Ireland are called Fairy-mushrooms; a kind of nice regularly-formed grass is named Fairy-flax, and the bells of the foxglove called in some places Fairy-bells, are also said to have some connexion with the Little People.