wise woman, whom many believe a witch; thus is he doubly guarded from the powers of evil. Beyond the forest lies the open path, where wife and children stand waiting by the cottage door. He is a brave man to wander in the gloaming, and if he reaches home there will be much to tell of all that he has seen, and heard, and felt. Should he be devoured by wolves, however,—and there is always this prosaic danger to be apprehended,—then his comrades will relate how he left them and went alone into the haunted woods, and his sorrowing widow will know that the fairies have carried him away, or turned him into stone. And the wise woman, reproached, perhaps, for the impotence of her charms, will say how with her own aged eyes she has three times seen Kourigan, Death's elder brother, flitting before the doomed man, and knew that his fate was sealed. So while fresh tales of mystery cluster round his name, and his children breathe them in trembling whispers by the fireside, their mother will wait hopefully for the spell to be broken, and the lost given back to her arms; until Pierrot, the charcoal-burner, persuades her that a stone remains
