Note 44 — Chapter VIII · THE RESCUE OF THE REALM

[From the door of her father’s dwelling she looked on an old oak wood. The fairies haunted that wood; their favourite spot was a certain spring near a great ash called the “fairies’ tree.” The children used to hang garlands on it and sing to it. These somewhile ladies and mistresses of the forest could no longer, it was said, assemble at the spring; they had been excluded from it for their sins. The church, however, always retained a jealous fear of the old local divinities, and the curé used to go once every year, and read a mass at the spring, in order to drive them away.c]