If you laid your ear against the mounds, you might hear the fairy music, sweet and faint, beneath the ground.

If you watched the mound at night, you might see the fairies dancing the turf short and smooth, or riding out on fairy horses, with green silk clothes and jingling bells.

But if you fell asleep upon the mounds, the fairy queen came out and carried you for seven years into Fairyland, till you awoke again in the same place, to find all changed around you, and yourself grown thin and old.
These are all dreams and fancies--untrue, not because they are too strange and wonderful, but because they are not strange and wonderful enough: for more wonderful sure than any fairy tale it is, that Madam How should make a rich and pleasant land by the brute force of ice.
And were there any men and women in that old age of ice?
That is a long story, and a dark one too; we will talk of it next time..