Source: (original) Prose Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, volume II (1866), pp. 237-240.
A Treasury of New England Folklore, B. A. Botkin, editor. (Crown
Publishers: New York, 1947). pp. 628-630.
airy
faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere--buried, indeed,--for the mad
painter Blake saw the funeral of the last of the little people, and an
irreverent English Bishop has sung their requiem. It never had much hold
upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being mostly of a sterner and less
poetical kind. The Irish Presbyterians who settled in New Hampshire about the
year 1720 brought indeed with them, among other strange matters, potatoes and
fairies; but while the former took root and flourished among us, the latter
died out, after lingering a few years in a very melancholy and disconsolate
way, looking regretfully back to their green turf dances, moonlight revels,
and cheerful nestling around the shealing fires of Ireland. The last that has been heard of them was some forty or fifty years ago in a tavern house in S---, New Hampshire. The landlord was a spiteful little man, whose sour, pinched look was a standing libel upon the state of his larder. He made his house so uncomfortable by his moroseness that travellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the next town. Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to practise total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips and goaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottles and glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out upon them with a look which seemed expressive of all sorts of evil wishes, broken legs, overturned carriages, spavined horses, sprained oxen, unsavory poultry, damaged butter, and bad markets. And if, as a matter of necessity, to "keep the cold out of his stomach," occasionally a wayfarer stopped his team and ventured to call for "something' warmin'," the testy publican stirred up the beverage in such a spiteful way, that, on receiving it foaming from his hand, the poor customer was half afraid to open his mouth, lest the red-hot flip iron should be plunged down his gullet.
As a matter of course, poverty came upon the house and its tenants like an armed man. Loose clapboards rattled in the wind; rags fluttered from the broken windows; within doors were tattered children and scanty fare. The landlord's wife was a stout, buxom woman, of Irish lineage, and, what with scolding her husband and liberally patronizing his bar in his absence, managed to keep, as she said, her "own heart whole," although the same could scarcely be said of her children's trousers and her own frock of homespun. She confidently predicted that "a betther day was coming," being, in fact, the only thing hopeful about the premises.
And it did come sure enough. Not only all the regular travellers on the road made a point of stopping at the tavern, but guests from all adjacent towns filled its long-deserted rooms,--the secret of which was, that it had somehow got abroad that a company of fairies had taken up their abode in the hostelry and daily held conversation with each other in the capacious parlor. I have heard those who at the time visited the tavern say that it was literally thronged for several weeks. Small, squeaking voices spoke in a sort of Yankee-Irish dialect, in the haunted room, to the astonishment and admiration of hundreds. The inn, of course, was blessed by this fairy visitation; the clapboards ceased their racket, clear panes took the place of rags in the sashes, and the little till under the bar grew daily heavy with coin. The magical influence extended even farther; for it was observable that the landlord wore a good-natured face, and that the landlady's visits to the gin-bottle were less and less frequent.
But the thing could not, in the
nature of the case, continue long. It was too late in the day and on the
wrong side of the water. As the novelty wore off, people began to doubt and
reason about it. Had the place been traversed by a ghost or disturbed by a
witch they could have acquiesced in it very quietly; but this outlandish
belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankee credulity. As might
have been expected, the little strangers, unable to breathe in an atmosphere
of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave, shaking off the dust of their
elfin feet as a testimony against this unbelieving generation. It was,
indeed, said that certain rude fellows from the Bay State pulled away a board
from the ceiling and disclosed to view the fairies in the shape of the
landlord's three slatternly daughters. But the reader who has any degree of
that charity which thinks no evil will rather credit the statement of the
fairies themselves, as reported by the mistress of the house, "that they were
tired of the new country, and had no pace of their lives among the Yankees,
and were going back to Ould Ireland."
