Empire unusual suggested

28
PASSPORT TO MAGONIA
another. My guide and informer said to me once, "I command a
regiment, Mr. ."
They travel greatly, and they can appear in Paris, Marseilles,
Naples, Genoa, Turin or Dublin, like ordinary people, and even in
crowds. They love especially Spain, Southern France, and the South
of Europe.
The Gentry take a great interest in the affairs of men and they
always stand for justice and right. Sometimes they fight among
themselves. They take young and intelligent people who are interesting.
They take the whole body and soul, transmuting the body
to a body like their own.
I asked them once if they ever died and they said, No; "we are
always kept young, Mr. ." Once they take you and you taste
food in their palace you cannot come back. They never taste anything
salt, but eat fresh meat and drink pure water. They marry and
have children. And one of them could marry a good and pure mortal.
They are able to appear in different forms. One once appeared to
me and seemed only four feet high, and stoutly built. He said, "I am
bigger than I appear to you now. We can make the old young, the
big small, the small big."
Now that we have refreshed the reader's memory regarding the
Gentry, perhaps we shall be forgiven for driving the parallel between
fairy-faith and ufology a good deal further. The Eagle River
incident, again, will be the occasion for our reflections.
The cakes given to Joe Simonton were composed of, among
other things, buckwheat hulls. And buckwheat is closely associated
with legends of Brittany, one of the most conservative Celtic
areas. In that area of France, belief in fairies (fees) is still widespread,
although Wentz and Paul Sebillot' had great difficulty,
about 1900, finding Bretons who said that they themselves had
seen fees. One of the peculiarities of Breton traditional legends
is the association of the fees or korrigans with a Tacc of beings
named /ions. In our chapter on the Secret Commonwealth we
shall study the fions more closely; here I want only to call the
reader's attention to one particularly pretty legend about fions
and magic buckwheat cakes.
It seems that once upon a time a black cow belonging to little
cave-dwelling fions ruined the buckwheat field of a poor woman,
who bitterly complained about the damage. The fions made a
deal with her: they would see to it that she should never run out
THE GOOD PEOPLE 29
of buckwheat cakes, provided she kept her mouth shut. And indeed
she and her family discovered that their supply of cakes was
inexhaustible. Alas! One day the woman gave some of the cake
to a man who should not have been entrusted with the secret of
its magical origin, and the family had to go back to the ordinary
way of making buckwheat cakes.
I hardly need remind the reader that the Bible, too, gives a few
examples of magical food supplies, similarly inexhaustible. Moreover,
stories narrated by actual people provide close parallels to
this theme. Witness the following account, given by Hartland:
A man who lived at Ystradfynlais, in Brecknockshire, going out
one day to look after his cattle and sheep on the mountain, disappeared.
In about three weeks, after search had been made in vain
for him and his wife had given him up for dead, he came home. His
wife asked him where he had been for the last three weeks. "Three
weeks? Is it three weeks you call three hours?" said he. Pressed to
say where he had been, he told her he had been playing his flute
(which he usually took with him on the mountain) at the Llorfa, a
spot near the Van Pool, when he was surrounded at a distance by
little beings like men, who closed nearer and nearer to him until
they became a very small circle. They sang and danced, and so affected
him that he quite lost himself. They offered him some small
cakes to eat, of which he partook; and he had never enjoyed himself
so well in his life. 3
Wcntz, too, has a few stories about the food from fairyland.
I Ic gathered them during his trips through the Celtic countries,
in the first few years of the present century. John Mac Neil of
Barra, an old man who spoke no English, told Michael Buchanan,
who translated the story from the Gaelic for Wentz, a pretty talc
about a girl who was taken by the fairies.
The fairies, he said, took the girl into their dwelling and set
her to work baking oat cakes. But no matter how much meal she
took from the closet, there was always the same amount left on
the shelf. And she had to keep baking and baking, until the old
fairy-man took pity on her and said,
I am sure you are wearying of the time and thinking long of
getting from our premises, and I will direct you to the means by
which you can get your leave. Whatever remainder of meal falls
from the cakes after being baked put into the meal closet and that
will stimulate my wife to give you leave.