Two wee sisters from the craggy mountains of Scotland.
Breagha, is the wild one. She's often gone for long hours, sometimes days at a time, exploring the craggy mountains and moors around their home. She rides on the back of a pine marten, a fiercely loyal creature named Ùisdean. She's a storyteller at heart, and she's often weaving tales in her mind as she rides, or collecting them from folk she meets along her way, to bring back and tell her little sister.
Eilidh is not adventurous like her sister at all, she prefers to be near home with her mother and her little brothers. But she loves to hear her sister's stories and imagine the wild and untamed places she's traveled. Eilidh has the most beautiful voice, and she loves to turn her sister's tales into songs that she sings for her brothers and her friends the birds.
The Fairies Dance
The fairies are dancing — how nimbly they bound!
They flit o’er the grass tops, they touch not the ground;
Their kirtles of green are with diamonds bedight,
All glittering and sparkling beneath the moonlight.
Hark, hark to their music! how silvery and clear —
‘Tis surely the flower-bells that ringing I hear, —
The lazy-wing’d moth, with the grasshopper wakes,
And the field-mouse peeps out, and their revels partakes.
How featly they trip it! how happy are they
Who pass all their moments in frolic and play,
Who rove where they list, without sorrows or cares,
And laugh at the fetters mortality wears!
But where have they vanish’d? — a cloud ‘s o’er the moon,
I’ll hie to the spot, — they’ll be seen again soon —
I hasten — ’tis lighter, — and what do I view? —
The fairies were grasses, the diamonds were dew.
And thus do the sparkling illusions of youth
Deceive and allure, and we take them for truth;
Too happy are they who the juggle unshroud,
Ere the hint to inspect them be brought by a cloud.
by Carolina Eliza Scott (1777-1853)
