And whether it was because of Peterkin’s escape into the garden, or what vaguely came to him there, or what Ian Mor told him as he carried him homeward in his arms, he did hear the horns of elf-land that night, and did see the gathering of the Shee in the moonshine. But it was in a drowsy hollow in the dim wood of sleep, wherein the birds were white soft-pinioned dreams, and the moon waxed and waned like the lily that sinks and rises in dark pools. IV In those first fragments of Peterkin’s experiences, all his life was foreshadowed. Wonder, delight, longing, laughter--the four winds of childhood--these blew for him through his first few years, through childhood and boyhood and youth. He is a man now; but though the laughter is rarer and the longing deeper and more constant, there still blow through the dark glens and wide sunlit moors of his mind the four winds of Laughter, Longing, Wonder, and Delight. As year after year went by, his mind became a storehouse of all that was most beautiful and marvellous in the Celtic wonder-world. It is no wonder this, since he had for story-teller Ian Mor, and Eilidh whom Ian loved; and knew every shepherd on the hillsides of Strachurmore, and every fisherman on the shores of Loch Fyne. The old ballads, the old romances, the strange fragments of the Ossianic tales, the lore of fairydom, fantastic folk-lore, craft of the woodlands, all of the outer and inner life grew into and became interwrought with the fibre of his most intimate being. I am not here telling the story of Peterkin himself. He stands, indeed, for many children rather than for one, for many lives and not an individual merely. In a sense, therefore, Peterkin is not merely a little child, a boy, a youth, who went through his years gladly laughing, mysteriously wondering, wrought to pain and joy, to suffering and delight, by all he saw and heard and inwardly learned; but a type of the Wonder-Child, and so a brother to all children, to poets, and dreamers. Of the many tales of old times which Peterkin loved, none did he dwell upon with so much delight as those three which are familiar throughout Ireland and Gaelic Scotland as “The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling.” In “The Children of Lir,” in “Deirdre and the Sons of Usna,” in “The Children of Turenn,” he found pre-eminently the haunting charm and sad exquisite beauty which are the colour and fragrance of the Celtic genius. And though in his manhood he turned with deeper emotion to tales such as “Dermid and Grainne,” or “The Amadan Mor,” it was of these early favourites that he loved to think, that he loved to re-read, to hear again, to re-tell.