There was a wild sort of a lad the name of Francis Pat, and he was a great warrant to be entertaining the people with his airy talk. He was the whole go in every spree and join was held in the countryside; and the neighbours all had a fine welcome when he’d come to make his cailee.

He joined the world when he was about thirty years of age, and he got a fine sensible woman with a nice little handful of money. Herself didn’t care to be rambling at all, and she’d sit with her stitching or knitting when he went out after dark.

It chanced one time, not a long from they were married, that Francis Pat went to a raffle was held in the next townland. When [108]the company set out for to go away home, in the black darkness of the night, every person in it was afraid to pass down by the fort.

“What is on you at all?” says Francis Pat. “I think scorn on the lot of you are in dread of the Good People.”

“God be with them—and their faces from us, their backs to us, the way they’re good friends,” says an old man. “I have great experience to know that it’s a danger to evenly make fun in speech of the like.”

“Away with you by the long hard road,” says Francis Pat. “’Tis I will walk my lone past the fort, and I dare the fairies to molest me.” The neighbours strove to break his intention, but he was persistent and proud.

When he came to the fort he seen a light, he heard voices speaking and the blows of an axe against wood.

“There is one more daring nor myself abroad this hour,” thinks Francis Pat. “I never heard tell of any person having audacity to interfere with the trees of the circle.”

Curiosity came on him to know who could it be, and he juked over to the light. He seen no sign of the men, however he peeped, but he heard the words and the blows. [109]

“Where’ll we carry the wood?” says a voice.

“To the house on the hill,” says another. “We be to bring out the wife of Francis Pat, and the tree may stop there in her stead.”

“He’ll never know the differ,” says the first. “It’s a fine thing surely to make an image from a tree that a man couldn’t know from herself.&............