The Ireland of Marrie Walsh's entrancing memoir is a place of magic indeed. Born Mary Kate Ferguson in the mountain community of County Mayo, young Marrie grew up in a worl lost to us today - a world of spring wells, of peat fires, and of fairies riding on the backs of hares. Her family were farming people, and when they were not nurturing the soil they were telling stories: Spinning webs of legends and heroes around the hearthfires while fiddlers played behind them, they gave everything in her world a sense of wonder that never left her. Half a century later, Marrie Walsh returns to the scenes of her youth in An Irish Country Childhood, the most rich and wondrous book of its kind since Alice Taylor's To School Through the Fields. Return with her, and you'll find a land where every neighbor was family; where hermits and bogey men and ghosts were all equally real, and equally frightening; where time, just for a moment, seemed to have stopped for a leisurely rest.