The Cleverness of Mortals

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"Then says Guleesh: 'Sure, father, you can marry me or anybody else you like, for you have your place back again, and here's the Pope's bull for that same. But it's not that I come for, but to ask you to give shelter to this young lady, the daughter of the King of France.'

"And with that he takes the Pope's bull out of his pocket and gives it to the priest, and the priest looked at the writing and the seal and saw that there was no doubt but it was right. And so he made Guleesh and the Princess come in and sit down, while Guleesh told him the whole story, and not a word of it would he have believed only there was the Pope's bull that he couldn't deny, and so at long last he had to believe all that Guleesh told him. And the end of it was that the Princess stayed at the priest's house, for they didn't know how to send her back to her father's palace, and they had no money, and she couldn't speak to help them. And the priest gave out that she was the daughter of his brother, that lived in another county, and that she was making him a visit. And Guleesh went home and said how he'd been sleeping beside the rath all night."

Naggeneen paused in his story, while all the fairies drew quietly closer to him. "Do you see," he said, "how I was tricked by a fool of a mortal? Oh, she was the beauty of the world, and he took her from me with a word, as easily as you'ld steal the butter out of a churn. And that was not all.

"I said to myself that I was not done with my revenge on them yet. She could not speak and it was a sore punishment on the both of them. Yet she stayed on at the priest's house. The priest wrote letters to her father, as I heard, and gave them to merchants who were travelling, but none of them ever reached him. And Guleesh got mighty serious about his soul all at once, so that he had to be at the priest's house every day, and every day he saw the Princess. She could never talk to him, but she learned to make signs that he could understand. And so it went on for a year.