THE CELTIC TWILIGHT

by

W. B. YEATS

 Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away. 

 THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

 The host is riding from Knocknarea, And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare; Caolte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling, "Away, come away; Empty your heart of its mortal dream. The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart, And if any gaze on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart. " The host is rushing 'twixt night and day; And where is there hope or deed as fair? Caolte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling, "Away, come away. "

THIS BOOK

I

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of thebeautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsyworld, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to anyof my own people who would look where I bid them. I have thereforewritten down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. I have, however, been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from thoseof the peasantry, but have rather let my men and women, dhouls andfaeries, go their way unoffended or defended by any argument of mine. The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pullthem carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will canweave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I toohave woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me. 

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she hasbuilt her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang outtheir garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloveddaughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little. 

1893. 

II

I have added a few more chapters in the manner of the old ones, andwould have added others, but one loses, as one grows older, somethingof the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in bothhands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is nogreat loss per haps. In these new chapters, as in the old ones, I haveinvented nothing but my comments and one or two deceitful sentencesthat may keep some poor story-teller's commerce with the devil and hisangels, or the like, from being known among his neighbours. I shallpublish in a little while a big book about the commonwealth of faery, and shall try to make it systematical and learned enough to buy pardonfor this handful of dreams. 

1902. 

W. B. YEATS. 

A TELLER OF TALES

Many of the tales in this book were told me by one Paddy Flynn, alittle bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabinin the village of Ballisodare, which is, he was wont to say, "the mostgentle"--whereby he meant faery--"place in the whole of County Sligo. "Others hold it, however, but second to Drumcliff and Drumahair. Thefirst time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the nexttime he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeedalways cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as theeyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) amelancholy which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionarymelancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all animals. 

And yet there was much in his life to depress him, for in the triplesolitude of age, eccentricity, and deafness, he went about muchpestered by children. It was for this very reason perhaps that he everrecommended mirth and hopefulness. He was fond, for instance, oftelling how Collumcille cheered up his mother. "How are you to-day, mother?" said the saint. "Worse, " replied the mother. "May you be worseto-morrow, " said the saint. The next day Collumcille came again, andexactly the same conversation took place, but the third day the mothersaid, "Better, thank God. " And the saint replied, "May you be betterto-morrow. " He was fond too of telling how the Judge smiles at the lastday alike when he rewards the good and condemns the lost to unceasingflames. He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make himsad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, "Am Inot annoyed with them?" I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee. "Ihave seen it, " he said, "down there by the water, batting the riverwith its hands. "

I have copied this account of Paddy Flynn, with a few verbalalterations, from a note-book which I almost filled with his tales andsayings, shortly after seeing him. I look now at the note-bookregretfully, for the blank pages at the end will never be filled up. Paddy Flynn is dead; a friend of mine gave him a large bottle ofwhiskey, and though a sober man at most times, the sight of so muchliquor filled him with a great enthusiasm, and he lived upon it forsome days and then died. His body, worn out with old age and hardtimes, could not bear the drink as in his young days. He was a greatteller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to emptyheaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people hisstories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less amplecircumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall byhis like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude ofimagination. What is literature but the expression of moods by thevehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which needheaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no lessthan this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall findno expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beaststo the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart ofrocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever preythe heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything istrue, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet. 

BELIEF AND UNBELIEF

There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman toldme last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keeppeople good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go"trapsin about the earth" at their own free will; "but there arefaeries, " she added, "and little leprechauns, and water-horses, andfallen angels. " I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooedupon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matterwhat one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with themohawk Indian on his arm said to me, "they stand to reason. " Even theofficial mind does not escape this faith. 

A little girl who was at service in the village of Grange, close underthe seaward slopes of Ben Bulben, suddenly disappeared one night aboutthree years ago. There was at once great excitement in theneighbourhood, because it was rumoured that the faeries had taken her. A villager was said to have long struggled to hold her from them, butat last they prevailed, and he found nothing in his hands but abroomstick. The local constable was applied to, and he at onceinstituted a house-to-house search, and at the same time advised thepeople to burn all the bucalauns (ragweed) on the field she vanishedfrom, because bucalauns are sacred to the faeries. They spent the wholenight burning them, the constable repeating spells the while. In themorning the little girl was found, the story goes, wandering in thefield. She said the faeries had taken her away a great distance, ridingon a faery horse. At last she saw a big river, and the man who hadtried to keep her from being carried off was drifting down it--such arethe topsy-turvydoms of faery glamour--in a cockleshell. On the way hercompanions had mentioned the names of several people who were about todie shortly in the village. 

Perhaps the constable was right. It is better doubtless to believemuch unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truthand unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candleto guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on themarsh, and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness wheredwell the mis-shapen dhouls. And after all, can we come to so greatevil if we keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, andwelcome with open hand whatever of excellent come to warm itself, whether it be man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to thedhouls themselves, "Be ye gone"? When all is said and done, how do wenot know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth?for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is readyfor the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into the world again, wild bees, wild bees!

MORTAL HELP

One hears in the old poems of men taken away to help the gods in abattle, and Cuchullan won the goddess Fand for a while, by helping hermarried sister and her sister's husband to overthrow another nation ofthe Land of Promise. I have been told, too, that the people of faerycannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal, whose body, or whatever has been put in its place, as the story-tellerwould say, is asleep at home. Without mortal help they are shadowy andcannot even strike the balls. One day I was walking over some marshyland in Galway with a friend when we found an old, hard-featured mandigging a ditch. My friend had heard that this man had seen a wonderfulsight of some kind, and at last we got the story out of him. When hewas a boy he was working one day with about thirty men and women andboys. They were beyond Tuam and not far from Knock-na-gur. Presentlythey saw, all thirty of them, and at a distance of about half-a-mile, some hundred and fifty of the people of faery. There were two of them, he said, in dark clothes like people of our own time, who stood about ahundred yards from one another, but the others wore clothes of allcolours, "bracket" or chequered, and some with red waistcoats. 

He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been playinghurley, for "they looked as if it was that. " Sometimes they wouldvanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of the bodiesof the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the size ofliving men, but the others were small. He saw them for about half-an-hour, and then the old man he and those about him were working for tookup a whip and said, "Get on, get on, or we will have no work done!" Iasked if he saw the faeries too, "Oh, yes, but he did not want work hewas paying wages for to be neglected. " He made every body work so hardthat nobody saw what happened to the faeries. 

1902. 

A VISIONARY

A young man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and beganto talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. Iquestioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poemsand painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly hadneither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon makinghis mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of theartist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily, however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never beenwritten down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in thereeds, [FN#1] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, andof Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly it seemed to me that he was peering about him a littleeagerly. "Do you see anything, X-----?" I said. "A shining, wingedwoman, covered by her long hair, is standing near the doorway, " heanswered, or some such words. "Is it the influence of some livingperson who thinks of us, and whose thoughts appear to us in thatsymbolic form?" I said; for I am well instructed in the ways of thevisionaries and in the fashion of their speech. "No, " he replied; "forif it were the thoughts of a person who is alive I should feel theliving influence in my living body, and my heart would beat and mybreath would fail. It is a spirit. It is some one who is dead or whohas never lived. "

[FN#1] I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me apart of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples ofthe world. I am not so pre-occupied with the mystery of Race as I usedto be, but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged. We once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser. 

I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop. Hispleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking to half-mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and conscience-stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles into hiscare. Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging, more thanone turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and sun themas it were in the subtle light of his mind. Sometimes visions come tohim as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told diverspeople true matters of their past days and distant friends, and leftthem hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce morethan a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them. 

The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions. Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived inother centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing themto their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him andit, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention hisname, for he wished to be always "unknown, obscure, impersonal. " Nextday a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words:"Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I couldever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of otheractivities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches. It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers. "

The poems were all endeavours to capture some high, impalpable mood ina net of obscure images. There were fine passages in all, but thesewere often embedded in thoughts which have evidently a special value tohis mind, but are to other men the counters of an unknown coinage. Tothem they seem merely so much brass or copper or tarnished silver atthe best. At other times the beauty of the thought was obscured bycareless writing as though he had suddenly doubted if writing was not afoolish labour. He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings, in which an unperfect anatomy did not altogether hide extreme beauty offeeling. The faeries in whom he believes have given him many subjects, notably Thomas of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the twilight while ayoung and beautiful creature leans softly out of the shadow andwhispers in his ear. He had delighted above all in strong effects ofcolour: spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathersof peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star; aspirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal-symbol of the soul-half shut within his hand. But always under this largess of colour laysome tender homily addressed to man's fragile hopes. This spiritualeagerness draws to him all those who, like himself, seek forillumination or else mourn for a joy that has gone. One of theseespecially comes to mind. A winter or two ago he spent much of thenight walking up and down upon the mountain talking to an old peasantwho, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him. Both were unhappy:X----- because he had then first decided that art and poetry were notfor him, and the old peasant because his life was ebbing out with noachievement remaining and no hope left him. Both how Celtic! how fullof striving after a something never to be completely expressed in wordor deed. The peasant was wandering in his mind with prolonged sorrow. Once he burst out with "God possesses the heavens--God possesses theheavens--but He covets the world"; and once he lamented that his oldneighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to drawa chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, "Who isthat old fellow there?" "The fret [Irish for doom] is over me, " herepeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. Morethan once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, "Onlymyself knows what happened under the thorn-tree forty years ago"; andas he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight. 

This old man always rises before me when I think of X-----. Both seek--one in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtleallegoric poetry-to express a something that lies beyond the range ofexpression; and both, if X----- will forgive me, have within them thevast and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celticheart. The peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duelists thatwere, and the whole hurly-burly of legends--Cuchulain fighting the seafor two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte stormingthe palace of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred yearsto appease his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering thecentral dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, andthis mind that finds them so interesting--all are a portion of thatgreat Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, norany angel revealed. 

VILLAGE GHOSTS

In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into ourminority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities;people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave yourfavourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle allthe affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass onunchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for allour talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumbmultitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peeringthrough the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makerswrote across unexplored regions, "Here are lions. " Across the villagesof fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, "Here are ghosts. "

My ghosts inhabit the village of H-----, in Leinster. History has inno manner been burdened by this ancient village, with its crookedlanes, its old abbey churchyard full of long grass, its greenbackground of small fir-trees, and its quay, where lie a few tarryfishing-luggers. In the annals of entomology it is well known. For asmall bay lies westward a little, where he who watches night afternight may see a certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of thetide, just at the end of evening or the beginning of dawn. A hundredyears ago it was carried here from Italy by smugglers in a cargo ofsilks and laces. If the moth-hunter would throw down his net, and gohunting for ghost tales or tales of the faeries and such-like childrenof Lillith, he would have need for far less patience. 

To approach the village at night a timid man requires great strategy. A man was once heard complaining, "By the cross of Jesus! how shall Igo? If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out onme. If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is theheadless one and another on the quays, and a new one under the oldchurchyard wall. If I go right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart isappearing at Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in the HospitalLane. "

I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not the onein the Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up toreceive patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down, butever since the ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts anddemons and faeries. There is a farmer at H-----, Paddy B----- by name-aman of great strength, and a teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law, musing on his great strength, often wonder what he would do if hedrank. One night when passing through the Hospital Lane, he saw what hesupposed at first to be a tame rabbit; after a little he found that itwas a white cat. When he came near, the creature slowly began to swelllarger and larger, and as it grew he felt his own strength ebbing away, as though it were sucked out of him. He turned and ran. 

By the Hospital Lane goes the "Faeries Path. " Every evening theytravel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the seaend of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who livedthere, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husbandwas asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After hehad been sitting there for a while, the woman said, "In the name ofGod, who are you?" He got up and went out, saying, "Never leave thedoor open at this hour, or evil may come to you. " She woke her husbandand told him. "One of the good people has been with us, " said he. 

Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart at Hillside Gate. When she livedshe was the wife of the Protestant clergyman. "Her ghost was neverknown to harm any one, " say the village people; "it is only doing apenance upon the earth. " Not far from Hillside Gate, where she haunted, appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt wasthe bogeen, a green lane leading from the western end of the village. Iquote its history at length: a typical village tragedy. In a cottage atthe village end of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim Montgomery, and his wife. They had several children. He was a little dandy, andcame of a higher class than his neighbours. His wife was a very bigwoman. Her husband, who had been expelled from the village choir fordrink, gave her a beating one day. Her sister heard of it, and came andtook down one of the window shutters--Montgomery was neat abouteverything, and had shutters on the outside of every window--and beathim with it, being big and strong like her sister. He threatened toprosecute her; she answered that she would break every bone in his bodyif he did. She never spoke to her sister again, because she had allowedherself to be beaten by so small a man. Jim Montgomery grew worse andworse: his wife soon began to have not enough to eat. She told no one, for she was very proud. Often, too, she would have no fire on a coldnight. If any neighbours came in she would say she had let the fire outbecause she was just going to bed. The people about often heard herhusband beating her, but she never told any one. She got very thin. Atlast one Saturday there was no food in the house for herself and thechildren. She could bear it no longer, and went to the priest and askedhim for some money. He gave her thirty shillings. Her husband met her, and took the money, and beat her. On the following Monday she got veryW, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly. Mrs. Kelly, as soon as she saw her, said, "My woman, you are dying, " and sent for the priest and the doctor. Shedied in an hour. After her death, as Montgomery neglected the children, the landlord had them taken to the workhouse. A few nights after theyhad gone, Mrs. Kelly was going home through the bogeen when the ghostof Mrs. Montgomery appeared and followed her. It did not leave heruntil she reached her own house. She told the priest, Father R, a notedantiquarian, and could not get him to believe her. A few nightsafterwards Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in the same place. She wasin too great terror to go the whole way, but stopped at a neighbour'scottage midway, and asked them to let her in. They answered they weregoing to bed. She cried out, "In the name of God let me in, or I willbreak open the door. " They opened, and so she escaped from the ghost. Next day she told the priest again. This time he believed, and said itwould follow her until she spoke to it. 

She met the spirit a third time in the bogeen. She asked what kept itfrom its rest. The spirit said that its children must be taken from theworkhouse, for none of its relations were ever there before, and thatthree masses were to be said for the repose of its soul. "If my husbanddoes not believe you, " she said, "show him that, " and touched Mrs. Kelly's wrist with three fingers. The places where they touched swelledup and blackened. She then vanished. For a time Montgomery would notbelieve that his wife had appeared: "she would not show herself to Mrs. Kelly, " he said--"she with respectable people to appear to. " He wasconvinced by the three marks, and the children were taken from theworkhouse. The priest said the masses, and the shade must have been atrest, for it has not since appeared. Some time afterwards JimMontgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty throughdrink. 

I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon thequay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, seesa woman with white borders to her cap[FN#2] creep out and follow him. The apparition only leaves him at his own door. The villagers imaginethat she follows him to avenge some wrong. "I will haunt you when Idie" is a favourite threat. His wife was once half-scared to death bywhat she considers a demon in the shape of a dog. 

[FN#2] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old Mayowoman, who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw "a woman with white borders to her cap going around the stacksin a field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months. "

These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of theirtribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves. 

One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy'sLane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She didnot open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The knockingceased. After a little the front-door and then the back-door were burstopen, and closed again. Her husband went to see what was wrong. Hefound both doors bolted. The child died. The doors were again openedand closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that she had forgottento leave window or door open, as the custom is, for the departure ofthe soul. These strange openings and closings and knockings werewarnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the dying. 

The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It isput up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who livewith it. I remember two children who slept with their mother andsisters and brothers in one small room. In the room was also a ghost. They sold herrings in the Dublin streets, and did not mind the ghostmuch, because they knew they would always sell their fish easily whilethey slept in the "ha'nted" room. 

I have some acquaintance among the ghost-seers of western villages. The Connaught tales are very different from those of Leinster. TheseH----- spirits have a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them. They come toannounce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong, to paytheir bills even--as did a fisherman's daughter the other day--and thenhasten to their rest. All things they do decently and in order. It isdemons, and not ghosts, that transform themselves into white cats orblack dogs. The people who tell the tales are poor, serious-mindedfishing people, who find in the doings of the ghosts the fascination offear. In the western tales is a whimsical grace, a curious extravagance. The people who recount them live in the most wild and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with flying clouds. They arefarmers and labourers, who do a little fishing now and then. They do notfear the spirits too much to feel an artistic and humorous pleasure intheir doings. The ghosts themselves share in their quaint hilarity. Inone western town, on whose deserted wharf the grass grows, these spiritshave so much vigour that, when a misbeliever ventured to sleep in ahaunted house, I have been told they flung him through the window, andhis bed after him. In the surrounding villages the creatures use themost strange disguises. A dead old gentleman robs the cabbages of hisown garden in the shape of a large rabbit. A wicked sea-captain stayedfor years inside the plaster of a cottage wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises. He was only dislodged when the wall wasbroken down; then out of the solid plaster the snipe rushed away whistling. 

"DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE"

I

I have been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to becalled a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whosename, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is theold square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and acottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a littlemill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upona little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or threetimes last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise womanthat lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, "There is acure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee, " and to findout from him or another whether she meant the moss between the runningwaters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shallbe there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautifulwoman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixtyyears ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life ofsorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old manbrought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long, narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and hesaid, "That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most ofit is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushesthat are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't growany more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin waslike dribbled snow"--he meant driven snow, perhaps, --"and she hadblushes in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gonenow!" I talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about her, and how it said, "there is a strong cellar inBallylee. " He said the strong cellar was the great hole where the riversank underground, and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otterhurried away under a grey boulder, and told me that many fish came upout of the dark water at early morning "to taste the fresh water comingdown from the hills. "

I first heard of the poem from an old woman who fives about two milesfurther up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. Shesays, "I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never willtill I die, " and that he was nearly blind, and had "no way of livingbut to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all theneighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praiseyou, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatestpoet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced tostand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and hemade verses praising it, and then when the water came through he madeverses dispraising it. " She sang the poem to a friend and to myself inIrish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in asong were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be thegarment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing oftheir energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry ofthe last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviouslytraditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has tospeak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything tothe woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friendthat was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it hasbeen made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of thesimplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations. 

 Going to Mass by the will of God, The day came wet and the wind rose; I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan, And I fell in love with her then and there. 

 I spoke to her kind and mannerly, As by report was her own way; And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy, You may come to-day to Ballylee. "

 When I heard her offer I did not linger, When her talk went to my heart my heart rose. We had only to go across the three fields, We had daylight with us to Ballylee. 

 The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure, She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me; And she said, "Drink, Raftery, and a hundred welcomes, There is a strong cellar in Ballylee. "

 O star of light and O sun in harvest, O amber hair, O my share of the world, Will you come with me upon Sunday Till we agree together before all the people?

 I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening, Punch on the table, or wine if you would drink it, But, O King of Glory, dry the roads before me, Till I find the way to Ballylee. 

 There is sweet air on the side of the hill When you are looking down upon Ballylee; When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries, There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe. 

 What is the worth of greatness till you have the light Of the flower of the branch that is by your side? There is no god to deny it or to try and hide it, She is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart. 

 There was no part of Ireland I did not travel, From the rivers to the tops of the mountains, To the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is hidden, And I saw no beauty but was behind hers. 

 Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too; Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet. She is the pride, and I give her the branch, She is the shining flower of Ballylee. 

 It is Mary Hynes, this calm and easy woman, Has beauty in her mind and in her face. If a hundred clerks were gathered together, They could not write down a half of her ways. 

An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (thefaeries) at night, says, "Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing evermade. My mother used to tell me about her, for she'd be at everyhurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many aseleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn't have anyof them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night, sittingtogether drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got up and setout to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open then, andwhen he came to it he fell into the water, and they found him deadthere in the morning. She died of the fever that was before thefamine. " Another old man says he was only a child when he saw her, buthe remembered that "the strongest man that was among us, one JohnMadden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing riversin the night-time to get to Ballylee. " This is perhaps the man theother remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes. Thereis an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtgehills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the oldpoem said, "the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry ofthe wolves, " but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity ofancient speech. She says, "The sun and the moon never shone on anybodyso handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she hadtwo little blushes on her cheeks. " And an old wrinkled woman who livesclose by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says, "Ioften saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches ofcurls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw MaryMolloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that wasin Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comelycreature. I was at her wake too--she had seen too much of the world. She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that fieldbeyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal(the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk. " This oldwoman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour ofsilver, for though I knew an old man--he is dead now--who thought shemight know "the cure for all the evils in the world, " that the Sidheknew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour. But a man by theshore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says, "Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; itis said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, buther clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness. And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing oneanother for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love withher, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song madeabout them will ever live long. "

Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, whocan use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as anold herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or ahusband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says"God bless them" when one's eyes are upon them. The old woman that sangthe song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was "taken, " as the phrase is, "for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they nottake her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and maybethere were some that did not say 'God bless her. '" An old man who livesby the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, "for thereare some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[FN#3] therebeyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland. " Shedied young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, andit may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally, meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen andcountrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many yearsnearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain ofthings, than are our men of learning. She "had seen too much of theworld"; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blameanother and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle asthe old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls. 

[FN#3] A "pattern, " or "patron, " is a festival in honour of a saint. 

The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great famethroughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind, and say, "I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to seeher, " or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may havebeen at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in theirkind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. Iasked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool na mna Sidhewhere women of faery have been seen, bow Raftery could have admiredMary Hynes so much f he had been altogether blind? He said, "I thinkRaftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way ofseeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more, andto do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight, and acertain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them. " Everybody, indeed, will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind but apoet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already given, says, "His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are threethings that are the gift of the Almighty--poetry and dancing andprinciples. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming downfrom the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning thana man with education you'd meet now, for they got it from God"; and aman at Coole says, "When he put his finger to one part of his head, everything would come to him as if it was written in a book"; and anold pensioner at Kiltartan says, "He was standing under a bush onetime, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some sayit was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice init, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. Thebush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside nowbetween this and Rahasine. " There is a poem of his about a bush, whichI have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable inthis shape. 

A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died, but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane toldDr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heavenfrom the roof of the house where he lay, and "that was the angels whowere with him"; and all night long there was a great light in thehovel, "and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave thathonour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religioussongs. " It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities toimmortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes and Rafteryto perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the magnificence andpenury of dreams. 

1900. 

II

When I was in a northern town awhile ago, I had a long talk with a manwho had lived in a neighbouring country district when he was a boy. Hetold me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that hadnot been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come fromthe Sidhe, and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names ofseveral beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty hadnever brought happiness to anybody. It was a thing, he said, to beproud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time, for they were more picturesque than my memory of them. 

1902. 

A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP

Away to the north of Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain lives "a strongfarmer, " a knight of the sheep they would have called him in the Gaelicdays. Proud of his descent from one of the most fighting clans of theMiddle Ages, he is a man of force alike in his words and in his deeds. There is but one man that swears like him, and this man lives far awayupon the mountain. "Father in Heaven, what have I done to deservethis?" he says when he has lost his pipe; and no man but he who liveson the mountain can rival his language on a fair day over a bargain. Heis passionate and abrupt in his movements, and when angry tosses hiswhite beard about with his left hand. 

One day I was dining with him when the servant-maid announced acertain Mr. O'Donnell. A sudden silence fell upon the old man and uponhis two daughters. At last the eldest daughter said somewhat severelyto her father, "Go and ask him to come in and dine. " The old man wentout, and then came in looking greatly relieved, and said, "He says hewill not dine with us. " "Go out, " said the daughter, "and ask him intothe back parlour, and give him some whiskey. " Her father, who had justfinished his dinner, obeyed sullenly, and I heard the door of the backparlour--a little room where the daughters sat and sewed during theevening--shut to behind the men. The daughter then turned to me andsaid, "Mr. O'Donnell is the tax-gatherer, and last year he raised ourtaxes, and my father was very angry, and when he came, brought him intothe dairy, and sent the dairy-woman away on a message, and then sworeat him a great deal. 'I will teach you, sir, ' O'Donnell replied, 'thatthe law can protect its officers'; but my father reminded him that hehad no witness. At last my father got tired, and sorry too, and said hewould show him a short way home. When they were half-way to the mainroad they came on a man of my father's who was ploughing, and thissomehow brought back remembrance of the wrong. He sent the man away ona message, and began to swear at the tax-gatherer again. When I heardof it I was disgusted that he should have made such a fuss over amiserable creature like O'Donnell; and when I heard a few weeks agothat O'Donnell's only son had died and left him heart-broken, Iresolved to make my father be kind to him next time he came. "

She then went out to see a neighbour, and I sauntered towards the backparlour. When I came to the door I heard angry voices inside. The twomen were evidently getting on to the tax again, for I could hear thembandying figures to and fro. I opened the door; at sight of my face thefarmer was reminded of his peaceful intentions, and asked me if I knewwhere the whiskey was. I had seen him put it into the cupboard, and wasable therefore to find it and get it out, looking at the thin, grief-struck face of the tax-gatherer. He was rather older than my friend, and very much more feeble and worn, and of a very different type. Hewas not like him, a robust, successful man, but rather one of thosewhose feet find no resting-place upon the earth. I recognized one ofthe children of reverie, and said, "You are doubtless of the stock ofthe old O'Donnells. I know well the hole in the river where theirtreasure lies buried under the guard of a serpent with many heads. ""Yes, sur, " he replied, "I am the last of a line of princes. "

We then fell to talking of many commonplace things, and my friend didnot once toss up his beard, but was very friendly. At last the gauntold tax-gatherer got up to go, and my friend said, "I hope we will havea glass together next year. " "No, no, " was the answer, "I shall be deadnext year. " "I too have lost sons, " said the other in quite a gentlevoice. "But your sons were not like my son. " And then the two menparted, with an angry flush and bitter hearts, and had I not castbetween them some common words or other, might not have parted, buthave fallen rather into an angry discussion of the value of their deadsons. If I had not pity for all the children of reverie I should havelet them fight it out, and would now have many a wonderful oath torecord. 

The knight of the sheep would have had the victory, for no soul thatwears this garment of blood and clay can surpass him. He was but oncebeaten; and this is his tale of how it was. He and some farm hands wereplaying at cards in a small cabin that stood against the end of a bigbarn. A wicked woman had once lived in this cabin. Suddenly one of theplayers threw down an ace and began to swear without any cause. Hisswearing was so dreadful that the others stood up, and my friend said, "All is not right here; there is a spirit in him. " They ran to the doorthat led into the barn to get away as quickly as possible. The woodenbolt would not move, so the knight of the sheep took a saw which stoodagainst the wall near at hand, and sawed through the bolt, and at oncethe door flew open with a bang, as though some one had been holding it, and they fled through. 

AN ENDURING HEART

One day a friend of mine was making a sketch of my Knight of theSheep. The old man's daughter was sitting by, and, when theconversation drifted to love and lovemaking, she said, "Oh, father, tell him about your love affair. " The old man took his pipe out of hismouth, and said, "Nobody ever marries the woman he loves, " and then, with a chuckle, "There were fifteen of them I liked better than thewoman I married, " and he repeated many women's names. He went on totell how when he was a lad he had worked for his grandfather, hismother's father, and was called (my friend has forgotten why) by hisgrandfather's name, which we will say was Doran. He had a great friend, whom I shall call John Byrne; and one day he and his friend went toQueenstown to await an emigrant ship, that was to take John Byrne toAmerica. When they were walking along the quay, they saw a girl sittingon a seat, crying miserably, and two men standing up in front of herquarrelling with one another. Doran said, "I think I know what iswrong. That man will be her brother, and that man will be her lover, and the brother is sending her to America to get her away from thelover. How she is crying! but I think I could console her myself. "Presently the lover and brother went away, and Doran began to walk upand down before her, saying, "Mild weather, Miss, " or the like. Sheanswered him in a little while, and the three began to talk together. The emigrant ship did not arrive for some days; and the three droveabout on outside cars very innocently and happily, seeing everythingthat was to be seen. When at last the ship came, and Doran had to breakit to her that he was not going to America, she cried more after himthan after the first lover. Doran whispered to Byrne as he went aboardship, "Now, Byrne, I don't grudge her to you, but don't marry young. "

When the story got to this, the farmer's daughter joined In mockinglywith, "I suppose you said that for Byrne's good, father. " But the oldman insisted that he had said it for Byrne's good; and went on to tellhow, when he got a letter telling of Byrne's engagement to the girl, hewrote him the same advice. Years passed by, and he heard nothing; andthough he was now married, he could not keep from wondering what shewas doing. At last he went to America to find out, and though he askedmany people for tidings, he could get none. More years went by, and hiswife was dead, and he well on in years, and a rich farmer with not afew great matters on his hands. He found an excuse in some vaguebusiness to go out to America again, and to begin his search again. Oneday he fell into talk with an Irishman in a railway carriage, and askedhim, as his way was, about emigrants from this place and that, and atlast, "Did you ever hear of the miller's daughter from Innis Rath?" andhe named the woman he was looking for. "Oh yes, " said the other, "sheis married to a friend of mine, John MacEwing. She lives at such-and-such a street in Chicago. " Doran went to Chicago and knocked at herdoor. She opened the door herself, and was "not a bit changed. " He gaveher his real name, which he had taken again after his grandfather'sdeath, and the name of the man he had met in the train. She did notrecognize him, but asked him to stay to dinner, saying that her husbandwould be glad to meet anybody who knew that old friend of his. Theytalked of many things, but for all their talk, I do not know why, andperhaps he did not know why, he never told her who he was. At dinner heasked her about Byrne, and she put her head down on the table and beganto cry, and she cried so he was afraid her husband might be angry. Hewas afraid to ask what had happened to Byrne, and left soon after, never to see her again. 

When the old man had finished the story, he said, "Tell that to Mr. Yeats, he will make a poem about it, perhaps. " But the daughter said, "Oh no, father. Nobody could make a poem about a woman like that. "Alas! I have never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart, whichhas loved Helen and all the lovely and fickle women of the world, wouldbe too sore. There are things it is well not to ponder over too much, things that bare words are the best suited for. 

1902. 

THE SORCERERS

In Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers, [FN#4] and comeacross any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination ofthe people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasyand caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, werethey to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise areof opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed hisrapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who storetheir honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flithither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate andmelancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire orthrough accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into theirhidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women fullof a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling aboutus, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and that wedo not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of magichave been but little practised. I have indeed come across very fewpersons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the fewI have met keep their purpose and practice wholly hidden from thoseamong whom they live. They are mainly small clerks and the like, andmeet for the purpose of their art in a room hung with black hangings. They would not admit me into this room, but finding me not altogetherignorant of the arcane science, showed gladly elsewhere what they woulddo. "Come to us, " said their leader, a clerk in a large flour-mill, "and we will show you spirits who will talk to you face to face, and inshapes as solid and heavy as our own. "

[FN#4] I know better now. We have the dark powers much more than Ithought, but not as much as the Scottish, and yet I think theimagination of the people does dwell chiefly upon the fantastic andcapricious. 

I had been talking of the power of communicating in states of trancewith the angelical and faery beings, --the children of the day and ofthe twilight--and he had been contending that we should only believein what we can see and feel when in our ordinary everyday state ofmind. "Yes, " I said, "I will come to you, " or some such words; "but Iwill not permit myself to become entranced, and will therefore knowwhether these shapes you talk of are any the more to be touched andfelt by the ordinary senses than are those I talk of. " I was notdenying the power of other beings to take upon themselves a clothing ofmortal substance, but only that simple invocations, such as he spokeof, seemed unlikely to do more than cast the mind into trance, andthereby bring it into the presence of the powers of day, twilight, anddarkness. 

"But, " he said, "we have seen them move the furniture hither andthither, and they go at our bidding, and help or harm people who knownothing of them. " I am not giving the exact words, but as accurately asI can the substance of our talk. 

On the night arranged I turned up about eight, and found the leadersitting alone in almost total darkness in a small back room. He wasdressed in a black gown, like an inquisitor's dress in an old drawing, that left nothing of him visible: except his eyes, which peered outthrough two small round holes. Upon the table in front of him was abrass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with paintedsymbols, two crossed daggers, and certain implements shaped like quernstones, which were used to control the elemental powers in some fashionI did not discover. I also put on a black gown, and remember that itdid not fit perfectly, and that it interfered with my movementsconsiderably. The sorcerer then took a black cock out of a basket, andcut its throat with one of the daggers, letting the blood fall into thelarge bowl. He opened a book and began an invocation, which wascertainly not English, and had a deep guttural sound. Before he hadfinished, another of the sorcerers, a man of about twenty-five, camein, and having put on a black gown also, seated himself at my leftband. I had the invoker directly in front of me, and soon began to findhis eyes, which glittered through the small holes in his hood, affecting me in a curious way. I struggled hard against theirinfluence, and my head began to ache. The invocation continued, andnothing happened for the first few minutes. Then the invoker got up andextinguished the light in the hall, so that no glimmer might comethrough the slit under the door. There was now no light except from theherbs on the brass dish, and no sound except from the deep gutturalmurmur of the invocation. 

Presently the man at my left swayed himself about, and cried out, "Ogod! O god!" I asked him what ailed him, but he did not know he hadspoken. A moment after he said he could see a great serpent movingabout the room, and became considerably excited. I saw nothing with anydefinite shape, but thought that black clouds were forming about me. Ifelt I must fall into a trance if I did not struggle against it, andthat the influence which was causing this trance was out of harmonywith itself, in other words, evil. After a struggle I got rid of theblack clouds, and was able to observe with my ordinary senses again. The two sorcerers now began to see black and white columns moving aboutthe room, and finally a man in a monk's habit, and they became greatlypuzzled because I did not see these things also, for to them they wereas solid as the table before them. The invoker appeared to be graduallyincreasing in power, and I began to feel as if a tide of darkness waspouring from him and concentrating itself about me; and now too Inoticed that the man on my left hand had passed into a death-liketrance. With a last great effort I drove off the black clouds; butfeeling them to be the only shapes I should see without passing into atrance, and having no great love for them, I asked for lights, andafter the needful exorcism returned to the ordinary world. 

I said to the more powerful of the two sorcerers--"What would happenif one of your spirits had overpowered me?" "You would go out of thisroom, " he answered, "with his character added to your own. " I askedabout the origin of his sorcery, but got little of importance, exceptthat he had learned it from his father. He would not tell me more, forhe had, it appeared, taken a vow of secrecy. 

For some days I could not get over the feeling of having a number ofdeformed and grotesque figures lingering about me. The Bright Powersare always beautiful and desirable, and the Dim Powers are nowbeautiful, now quaintly grotesque, but the Dark Powers express theirunbalanced natures in shapes of ugliness and horror. 

THE DEVIL

My old Mayo woman told me one day that something very bad had comedown the road and gone into the house opposite, and though she wouldnot say what it was, I knew quite well. Another day she told me of twofriends of hers who had been made love to by one whom they believed tobe the devil. One of them was standing by the road-side when he came byon horseback, and asked her to mount up behind him, and go riding. Whenshe would not he vanished. The other was out on the road late at nightwaiting for her young man, when something came flapping and rollingalong the road up to her feet. It had the likeness of a newspaper, andpresently it flapped up into her face, and she knew by the size of itthat it was the Irish Times. All of a sudden it changed into a youngman, who asked her to go walking with him. She would not, and hevanished. 

I know of an old man too, on the slopes of Ben Bulben, who found thedevil ringing a bell under his bed, and he went off and stole thechapel bell and rang him out. It may be that this, like the others, wasnot the devil at all, but some poor wood spirit whose cloven feet hadgot him into trouble. 

HAPPY AND UNHAPPY THEOLOGIANS

I

A mayo woman once said to me, "I knew a servant girl who hung herselffor the love of God. She was lonely for the priest and hersociety, [FN#5] and hung herself to the banisters with a scarf. She wasno sooner dead than she became white as a lily, and if it had beenmurder or suicide she would have become black as black. They gave herChristian burial, and the priest said she was no sooner dead than shewas with the Lord. So nothing matters that you do for the love of God. "I do not wonder at the pleasure she has in telling this story, for sheherself loves all holy things with an ardour that brings them quicklyto her lips. She told me once that she never hears anything describedin a sermon that she does not afterwards see with her eyes. She hasdescribed to me the gates of Purgatory as they showed themselves to hereyes, but I remember nothing of the description except that she couldnot see the souls in trouble but only the gates. Her mind continuallydwells on what is pleasant and beautiful. One day she asked me whatmonth and what flower were the most beautiful. When I answered that Idid not know, she said, "the month of May, because of the Virgin, andthe lily of the valley, because it never sinned, but came pure out ofthe rocks, " and then she asked, "what is the cause of the three coldmonths of winter?" I did not know even that, and so she said, "the sinof man and the vengeance of God. " Christ Himself was not only blessed, but perfect in all manly proportions in her eyes, so much do beauty andholiness go together in her thoughts. He alone of all men was exactlysix feet high, all others are a little more or a little less. 

[FN#5] The religious society she had belonged to. 

Her thoughts and her sights of the people of faery are pleasant andbeautiful too, and I have never heard her call them the Fallen Angels. They are people like ourselves, only better-looking, and many and manya time she has gone to the window to watch them drive their waggonsthrough the sky, waggon behind waggon in long line, or to the door tohear them singing and dancing in the Forth. They sing chiefly, itseems, a song called "The Distant Waterfall, " and though they onceknocked her down she never thinks badly of them. She saw them mosteasily when she was in service in King's County, and one morning alittle while ago she said to me, "Last night I was waiting up for themaster and it was a quarter-past eleven. I heard a bang right down onthe table. 'King's County all over, ' says I, and I laughed till I wasnear dead. It was a warning I was staying too long. They wanted theplace to themselves. " I told her once of somebody who saw a faery andfainted, and she said, "It could not have been a faery, but some badthing, nobody could faint at a faery. It was a demon. I was not afraidwhen they near put me, and the bed under me, out through the roof. Iwasn't afraid either when you were at some work and I heard a thingcoming flop-flop up the stairs like an eel, and squealing. It went toall the doors. It could not get in where I was. I would have sent itthrough the universe like a flash of fire. There was a man in my place, a tearing fellow, and he put one of them down. He went out to meet iton the road, but he must have been told the words. But the faeries arethe best neighbours. If you do good to them they will do good to you, but they don't like you to be on their path. " Another time she said tome, "They are always good to the poor. "

II

There is, however, a man in a Galway village who can see nothing butwickedness. Some think him very holy, and others think him a littlecrazed, but some of his talk reminds one of those old Irish visions ofthe Three Worlds, which are supposed to have given Dante the plan ofthe Divine Comedy. But I could not imagine this man seeing Paradise. Heis especially angry with the people of faery, and describes the faun-like feet that are so common among them, who are indeed children ofPan, to prove them children of Satan. He will not grant that "theycarry away women, though there are many that say so, " but he is certainthat they are "as thick as the sands of the sea about us, and theytempt poor mortals. "

He says, "There is a priest I know of was looking along the groundlike as if he was hunting for something, and a voice said to him, 'Ifyou want to see them you'll see enough of them, ' and his eyes wereopened and he saw the ground thick with them. Singing they do besometimes, and dancing, but all the time they have cloven feet. " Yet hewas so scornful of unchristian things for all their dancing and singingthat he thinks that "you have only to bid them begone and they will go. It was one night, " he says, "after walking back from Kinvara and downby the wood beyond I felt one coming beside me, and I could feel thehorse he was riding on and the way he lifted his legs, but they do notmake a sound like the hoofs of a horse. So I stopped and turned aroundand said, very loud, 'Be off!' and he went and never troubled me after. And I knew a man who was dying, and one came on his bed, and he criedout to it, 'Get out of that, you unnatural animal!' and it left him. Fallen angels they are, and after the fall God said, 'Let there beHell, ' and there it was in a moment. " An old woman who was sitting bythe fire joined in as he said this with "God save us, it's a pity Hesaid the word, and there might have been no Hell the day, " but the seerdid not notice her words. He went on, "And then he asked the devil whatwould he take for the souls of all the people. And the devil saidnothing would satisfy him but the blood of a virgin's son, so he gotthat, and then the gates of Hell were opened. " He understood the story, it seems, as if it were some riddling old folk tale. 

"I have seen Hell myself. I had a sight of it one time in a vision. Ithad a very high wall around it, all of metal, and an archway, and astraight walk into it, just like what 'ud be leading into a gentleman'sorchard, but the edges were not trimmed with box, but with red-hotmetal. And inside the wall there were cross-walks, and I'm not surewhat there was to the right, but to the left there were five greatfurnaces, and they full of souls kept there with great chains. So Iturned short and went away, and in turning I looked again at the wall, and I could see no end to it. 

"And another time I saw Purgatory. It seemed to be in a level place, and no walls around it, but it all one bright blaze, and the soulsstanding in it. And they suffer near as much as in Hell, only there areno devils with them there, and they have the hope of Heaven. 

"And I heard a call to me from there, 'Help me to come out o' this!'And when I looked it was a man I used to know in the army, an Irishman, and from this county, and I believe him to be a descendant of KingO'Connor of Athenry. 

"So I stretched out my hand first, but then I called out, 'I'd beburned in the flames before I could get within three yards of you. ' Sothen he said, 'Well, help me with your prayers, ' and so I do. 

"And Father Connellan says the same thing, to help the dead with yourprayers, and he's a very clever man to make a sermon, and has a greatdeal of cures made with the Holy Water he brought back from Lourdes. "

1902. 

THE LAST GLEEMAN

Michael Moran was born about 1794 off Black Pitts, in the Liberties ofDublin, in Faddle Alley. A fortnight after birth he went stone blindfrom illness, and became thereby a blessing to his parents, who weresoon able to send him to rhyme and beg at street corners and at thebridges over the Liffey. They may well have wished that their quiverwere full of such as he, for, free from the interruption of sight, hismind became a perfect echoing chamber, where every movement of the dayand every change of public passion whispered itself into rhyme orquaint saying. By the time he had grown to manhood he was the admittedrector of all the ballad-mongers of the Liberties. Madden, the weaver, Kearney, the blind fiddler from Wicklow, Martin from Meath, M'Bridefrom heaven knows where, and that M'Grane, who in after days, when thetrue Moran was no more, strutted in borrowed plumes, or rather inborrowed rags, and gave out that there had never been any Moran buthimself, and many another, did homage before him, and held him chief ofall their tribe. Nor despite his blindness did he find any difficultyin getting a wife, but rather was able to pick and choose, for he wasjust that mixture of ragamuffin and of genius which is dear to theheart of woman, who, perhaps because she is wholly conventionalherself, loves the unexpected, the crooked, the bewildering. Nor did helack, despite his rags, many excellent things, for it is rememberedthat he ever loved caper sauce, going so far indeed in his honestindignation at its absence upon one occasion as to fling a leg ofmutton at his wife. He was not, however, much to look at, with hiscoarse frieze coat with its cape and scalloped edge, his old corduroytrousers and great brogues, and his stout stick made fast to his wristby a thong of leather: and he would have been a woeful shock to thegleeman MacConglinne, could that friend of kings have beheld him inprophetic vision from the pillar stone at Cork. And yet though theshort cloak and the leather wallet were no more, he was a true gleeman, being alike poet, jester, and newsman of the people. In the morningwhen he had finished his breakfast, his wife or some neighbour wouldread the newspaper to him, and read on and on until he interruptedwith, "That'll do--I have me meditations"; and from these meditationswould come the day's store of jest and rhyme. He had the whole MiddleAges under his frieze coat. 

He had not, however, MacConglinne's hatred of the Church and clergy, for when the fruit of his meditations did not ripen well, or when thecrowd called for something more solid, he would recite or sing ametrical tale or ballad of saint or martyr or of Biblical adventure. Hewould stand at a street comer, and when a crowd had gathered wouldbegin in some such fashion as follows (I copy the record of one whoknew him)--"Gather round me, boys, gather round me. Boys, am I standin'in puddle? am I standin' in wet?" Thereon several boys would cry, "Ali, no! yez not! yer in a nice dry place. Go on with St. Mary; go on withMoses"--each calling for his favourite tale. Then Moran, with asuspicious wriggle of his body and a clutch at his rags, would burstout with "All me buzzim friends are turned backbiters"; and after afinal "If yez don't drop your coddin' and diversion I'll lave some ofyez a case, " by way of warning to the boys, begin his recitation, orperhaps still delay, to ask, "Is there a crowd round me now? Anyblackguard heretic around me?" The best-known of his religious taleswas St. Mary of Egypt, a long poem of exceeding solemnity, condensedfrom the much longer work of a certain Bishop Coyle. It told how a fastwoman of Egypt, Mary by name, followed pilgrims to Jerusalem for nogood purpose, and then, turning penitent on finding herself withheldfrom entering the Temple by supernatural interference, fled to thedesert and spent the remainder of her life in solitary penance. When atlast she was at the point of death, God sent Bishop Zozimus to hear herconfession, give her the last sacrament, and with the help of a lion, whom He sent also, dig her grave. The poem has the intolerable cadenceof the eighteenth century, but was so popular and so often called forthat Moran was soon nicknamed Zozimus, and by that name is heremembered. He had also a poem of his own called Moses, which went alittle nearer poetry without going very near. But he could ill brooksolemnity, and before long parodied his own verses in the followingragamuffin fashion:

 In Egypt's land, contagious to the Nile, King Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe in style. She tuk her dip, then walked unto the land, To dry her royal pelt she ran along the strand. A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw A smiling babby in a wad o' straw. She tuk it up, and said with accents mild, "'Tare-and-agers, girls, which av yez owns the child?"

His humorous rhymes were, however, more often quips and cranks at theexpense of his contemporaries. It was his delight, for instance, toremind a certain shoemaker, noted alike for display of wealth and forpersonal uncleanness, of his inconsiderable origin in a song of whichbut the first stanza has come down to us:

 At the dirty end of Dirty Lane, Liv'd a dirty cobbler, Dick Maclane; His wife was in the old king's reign A stout brave orange-woman. On Essex Bridge she strained her throat, And six-a-penny was her note. But Dickey wore a bran-new coat, He got among the yeomen. He was a bigot, like his clan, And in the streets he wildly sang, O Roly, toly, toly raid, with his old jade. 

He had troubles of divers kinds, and numerous interlopers to face andput down. Once an officious peeler arrested him as a vagabond, but wastriumphantly routed amid the laughter of the court, when Moran remindedhis worship of the precedent set by Homer, who was also, he declared, apoet, and a blind man, and a beggarman. He had to face a more seriousdifficulty as his fame grew. Various imitators started up upon allsides. A certain actor, for instance, made as many guineas as Moran didshillings by mimicking his sayings and his songs and his getup upon thestage. One night this actor was at supper with some friends, whendispute arose as to whether his mimicry was overdone or not. It wasagreed to settle it by an appeal to the mob. A forty-shilling supper ata famous coffeehouse was to be the wager. The actor took up his stationat Essex Bridge, a great haunt of Moran's, and soon gathered a smallcrowd. He had scarce got through "In Egypt's land, contagious to theNile, " when Moran himself came up, followed by another crowd. Thecrowds met in great excitement and laughter. "Good Christians, " criedthe pretender, "is it possible that any man would mock the poor darkman like that?"

"Who's that? It's some imposhterer, " replied Moran. 

"Begone, you wretch! it's you'ze the imposhterer. Don't you fear thelight of heaven being struck from your eyes for mocking the poor darkman?"

"Saints and angels, is there no protection against this? You're a mostinhuman-blaguard to try to deprive me of my honest bread this way, "replied poor Moran. 

"And you, you wretch, won't let me go on with the beautiful poem. Christian people, in your charity won't you beat this man away? he'staking advantage of my darkness. "

The pretender, seeing that he was having the best of it, thanked thepeople for their sympathy and protection, and went on with the poem, Moran listening for a time in bewildered silence. After a while Moranprotested again with:

"Is it possible that none of yez can know me? Don't yez see it'smyself; and that's some one else?"

"Before I can proceed any further in this lovely story, " interruptedthe pretender, "I call on yez to contribute your charitable donationsto help me to go on. "

"Have you no sowl to be saved, you mocker of heaven?" cried Moran, Putcompletely beside himself by this last injury--"Would you rob the pooras well as desave the world? O, was ever such wickedness known?"

"I leave it to yourselves, my friends, " said the pretender, "to giveto the real dark man, that you all know so well, and save me from thatschemer, " and with that he collected some pennies and half-pence. Whilehe was doing so, Moran started his Mary of Egypt, but the indignantcrowd seizing his stick were about to belabour him, when they fell backbewildered anew by his close resemblance to himself. The pretender nowcalled to them to "just give him a grip of that villain, and he'd soonlet him know who the imposhterer was!" They led him over to Moran, butinstead of closing with him he thrust a few shillings into his hand, and turning to the crowd explained to them he was indeed but an actor, and that he had just gained a wager, and so departed amid muchenthusiasm, to eat the supper he had won. 

In April 1846 word was sent to the priest that Michael Moran wasdying. He found him at 15 (now 14 1/2) Patrick Street, on a straw bed, ina room full of ragged ballad-singers come to cheer his last moments. After his death the ballad-singers, with many fiddles and the like, came again and gave him a fine wake, each adding to the merrimentwhatever he knew in the way of rann, tale, old saw, or quaint rhyme. Hehad had his day, had said his prayers and made his confession, and whyshould they not give him a hearty send-off? The funeral took place thenext day. A good party of his admirers and friends got into the hearsewith the coffin, for the day was wet and nasty. They had not gone farwhen one of them burst out with "It's cruel cowld, isn't it?" "Garra', "replied another, "we'll all be as stiff as the corpse when we get tothe berrin-ground. " "Bad cess to him, " said a third; "I wish he'd heldout another month until the weather got dacent. " A man called Carrollthereupon produced a half-pint of whiskey, and they all drank to thesoul of the departed. Unhappily, however, the hearse was over-weighted, and they had not reached the cemetery before the spring broke, and thebottle with it. 

Moran must have felt strange and out of place in that other kingdom hewas entering, perhaps while his friends were drinking in his honour. Let us hope that some kindly middle region was found for him, where hecan call dishevelled angels about him with some new and more rhythmicalform of his old

 Gather round me, boys, will yez Gather round me? And hear what I have to say Before ould Salley brings me My bread and jug of tay;

and fling outrageous quips and cranks at cherubim and seraphim. Perhaps he may have found and gathered, ragamuffin though he be, theLily of High Truth, the Rose of Far-sought Beauty, for whose lack somany of the writers of Ireland, whether famous or forgotten, have beenfutile as the blown froth upon the shore. 

REGINA, REGINA PIGMEORUM, VENI

One night a middle-aged man, who had lived all his life far from thenoise of cab-wheels, a young girl, a relation of his, who was reportedto be enough of a seer to catch a glimpse of unaccountable lightsmoving over the fields among the cattle, and myself, were walking alonga far western sandy shore. We talked of the Forgetful People as thefaery people are sometimes called, and came in the midst of our talk toa notable haunt of theirs, a shallow cave amidst black rocks, with itsreflection under it in the wet sea sand. I asked the young girl if shecould see anything, for I had quite a number of things to ask theForgetful People. She stood still for a few minutes, and I saw that shewas passing into a kind of waking trance, in which the cold sea breezeno longer troubled her, nor the dull boom of the sea distracted herattention. I then called aloud the names of the great faeries, and in amoment or two she said that she could hear music far inside the rocks, and then a sound of confused talking, and of people stamping their feetas if to applaud some unseen performer. Up to this my other friend hadbeen walking to and fro some yards off, but now he passed close to us, and as he did so said suddenly that we were going to be interrupted, for he heard the laughter of children somewhere beyond the rocks. Wewere, however, quite alone. The spirits of the place had begun to casttheir influence over him also. In a moment he was corroborated by thegirl, who said that bursts of laughter had begun to mingle with themusic, the confused talking, and the noise of feet. She next saw abright light streaming out of the cave, which seemed to have grown muchdeeper, and a quantity of little people, [FN#6] in various coloureddresses, red predominating, dancing to a tune which she did notrecognize. 

[FN#6] The people and faeries in Ireland are sometimes as big as weare, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about threefeet high. The Old Mayo woman I so often quote, thinks that it issomething in our eyes that makes them seem big or little. 

I then bade her call out to the queen of the little people to come andtalk with us. There was, however, no answer to her command. I thereforerepeated the words aloud myself, and in a moment a very beautiful tallwoman came out of the cave. I too had by this time fallen into a kindof trance, in which what we call the unreal had begun to take uponitself a masterful reality, and was able to see the faint gleam ofgolden ornaments, the shadowy blossom of dim hair. I then bade the girltell this tall queen to marshal her followers according to theirnatural divisions, that we might see them. I found as before that I hadto repeat the command myself. The creatures then came out of the cave, and drew themselves up, if I remember rightly, in four bands. One ofthese bands carried quicken boughs in their hands, and another hadnecklaces made apparently of serpents' scales, but their dress I cannotremember, for I was quite absorbed in that gleaming woman. I asked herto tell the seer whether these caves were the greatest faery haunts inthe neighbourhood. Her lips moved, but the answer was inaudible. I badethe seer lay her hand upon the breast of the queen, and after that sheheard every word quite distinctly. No, this was not the greatest faeryhaunt, for there was a greater one a little further ahead. I then askedher whether it was true that she and her people carried away mortals, and if so, whether they put another soul in the place of the one theyhad taken? "We change the bodies, " was her answer. "Are any of you everborn into mortal life?" "Yes. " "Do I know any who were among yourpeople before birth?" "You do. " "Who are they?" "It would not be lawfulfor you to know. " I then asked whether she and her people were not"dramatizations of our moods"? "She does not understand, " said myfriend, "but says that her people are much like human beings, and domost of the things human beings do. " I asked her other questions, as toher nature, and her purpose in the universe, but only seemed to puzzleher. At last she appeared to lose patience, for she wrote this messagefor me upon the sands--the sands of vision, not the grating sands underour feet--"Be careful, and do not seek to know too much about us. "Seeing that I had offended her, I thanked her for what she had shownand told, and let her depart again into her cave. In a little while theyoung girl awoke out of her trance, and felt again the cold wind of theworld, and began to shiver. 

I tell these things as accurately as I can, and with no theories toblur the history. Theories are poor things at the best, and the bulk ofmine have perished long ago. I love better than any theory the sound ofthe Gate of Ivory, turning upon its hinges, and hold that he alone whohas passed the rose-strewn threshold can catch the far glimmer of theGate of Horn. It were perhaps well for us all if we would but raise thecry Lilly the astrologer raised in Windsor Forest, "Regina, ReginaPigmeorum, Veni, " and remember with him, that God visiteth His childrenin dreams. Tall, glimmering queen, come near, and let me see again theshadowy blossom of thy dim hair. 

"AND FAIR, FIERCE WOMEN"

One day a woman that I know came face to face with heroic beauty, thathighest beauty which Blake says changes least from youth to age, abeauty which has been fading out of the arts, since that decadence wecall progress, set voluptuous beauty in its place. She was standing atthe window, looking over to Knocknarea where Queen Maive is thought tobe buried, when she saw, as she has told me, "the finest woman you eversaw travelling right across from the mountain and straight to her. " Thewoman had a sword by her side and a dagger lifted up in her hand, andwas dressed in white, with bare arms and feet. She looked "very strong, but not wicked, " that is, not cruel. The old woman had seen the Irishgiant, and "though he was a fine man, " he was nothing to this woman, "for he was round, and could not have stepped out so soldierly"; "shewas like Mrs. -----" a stately lady of the neighbourhood, "but she hadno stomach on her, and was slight and broad in the shoulders, and washandsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about thirty. " The oldwoman covered her eyes with her hands, and when she uncovered them theapparition had vanished. The neighbours were "wild with her, " she toldme, because she did not wait to find out if there was a message, forthey were sure it was Queen Maive, who often shows herself to thepilots. I asked the old woman if she had seen others like Queen Maive, and she said, "Some of them have their hair down, but they look quitedifferent, like the sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Thosewith their hair up are like this one. The others have long whitedresses, but those with their hair up have short dresses, so that youcan see their legs right up to the calf. " After some carefulquestioning I found that they wore what might very well be a kind ofbuskin; she went on, "They are fine and dashing looking, like the menone sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of themountains with their swords swinging. " She repeated over and over, "There is no such race living now, none so finely proportioned, " or thelike, and then said, "The present Queen[FN#7] is a nice, pleasant-looking woman, but she is not like her. What makes me think so littleof the ladies is that I see none as they be, " meaning as the spirits. "When I think of her and of the ladies now, they are like littlechildren running about without knowing how to put their clothes onright. Is it the ladies? Why, I would not call them women at all. " Theother day a friend of mine questioned an old woman in a Galwayworkhouse about Queen Maive, and was told that "Queen Maive washandsome, and overcame all her enemies with a bawl stick, for the hazelis blessed, and the best weapon that can be got. You might walk theworld with it, " but she grew "very disagreeable in the end--oh verydisagreeable. Best not to be talking about it. Best leave it betweenthe book and the hearer. " My friend thought the old woman had got somescandal about Fergus son of Roy and Maive in her head. 

[FN#7] Queen Victoria. 

And I myself met once with a young man in the Burren Hills whoremembered an old poet who made his poems in Irish and had met when hewas young, the young man said, one who called herself Maive, and saidshe was a queen "among them, " and asked him if he would have money orpleasure. He said he would have pleasure, and she gave him her love fora time, and then went from him, and ever after he was very mournful. The young man had often heard him sing the poem of lamentation that hemade, but could only remember that it was "very mournful, " and that hecalled her "beauty of all beauties. "

1902. 

ENCHANTED WOODS

I

Last summer, whenever I had finished my day's work, I used to gowandering in certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an oldcountryman, and talk to him about his work and about the woods, andonce or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heartmore readily than to me, He had spent all his life lopping away thewitch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths, and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures ofthe wood. He has heard the hedgehog--"grainne oge, " he calls him--"grunting like a Christian, " and is certain that he steals apples byrolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking toevery quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many inthe woods, have a language of their own--some kind of old Irish. Hesays, "Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time ofsome great change in the world. That is why they are hard to kill, andwhy it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it mightclaw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that wouldbe the serpent's tooth. " Sometimes he thinks they change into wildcats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wildcats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in thewoods. The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran awayand became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels--whomhe hates--with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times hiseyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogsunroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning strawunder them. 

I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural andsupernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and catslike, above all, to be in the "forths" and lisses after nightfall; andhe will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about aspirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about amarten cat--a rare beast now-a-days. Many years ago he used to work inthe garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden-house wherethere was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear peoplerattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. Once, at any rate, be has seen an unearthly sight in the woods. He says, "Onetime I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight o'clockone morning when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hairhanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good, cleanface, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no waygaudy but simple, and when she felt me coming she gathered herself upand was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed herand looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day tothis, never again. " He used the word clean as we would use words likefresh or comely. 

Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods. A labourer toldus of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that iscalled Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the weed. Hesaid, "One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and hewent away through the path in Shanwalla, an' bid me goodnight. And twohours after, there he was back again in the yard, an' bid me light acandle that was in the stable. An' he told me that when he got intoShanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a headas big as a man's body, came beside him and led him out of the path an'round about, and at last it brought him to the lime-kiln, and then itvanished and left him. "

A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certaindeep pool in the river. She said, "I came over the stile from thechapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came andtwo trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splashof water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with mesaw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bankwhere the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was headless. "

A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy wentto catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes ofhazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake sideis for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was withhim, "I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it willstay on it, " meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would notbe able to go through it. So he took up "a pebble of cow-dung, and assoon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful musicthat ever was heard. " They ran away, and when they had gone about twohundred yards they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white, walking round and round the bush. "First it had the form of a woman, and then of a man, and it was going round the bush. "

II

I often entangle myself in argument more complicated than even thosepaths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but atother times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinionabout a nymph of the Illissus, "The common opinion is enough for me. " Ibelieve when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom wecannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and somewicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have everseen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasantand quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a woodwithout feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody orsomething I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. Andnow I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice withalmost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me. You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, whereveryour ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or theMoon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certaintybelieve that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathersimagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but somevague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gatewayout of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long bebeauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire andfatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sportthan to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made amonggreen leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket ofargument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only wewho have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simpleof all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and evenspoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as Ithink, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep ournatures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shallunite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons amongblue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but

 Foreshadowings mingled with the images Of man's misdeeds in greater days than these, as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in goodspirits. 

1902

MIRACULOUS CREATURES

There are marten cats and badgers and foxes in the Enchanted Woods, but there are of a certainty mightier creatures, and the lake hideswhat neither net nor fine can take. These creatures are of the race ofthe white stag that flits in and out of the tales of Arthur, and of theevil pig that slew Diarmuid where Ben Bulben mixes with the sea wind. They are the wizard creatures of hope and fear, they are of them thatfly and of them that follow among the thickets that are about the Gatesof Death. A man I know remembers that his father was one night in thewood Of Inchy, "where the lads of Gort used to be stealing rods. He wassitting by the wall, and the dog beside him, and he heard somethingcome running from Owbawn Weir, and he could see nothing, but the soundof its feet on the ground was like the sound of the feet of a deer. Andwhen it passed him, the dog got between him and the wall and scratchedat it there as if it was afraid, but still he could see nothing butonly hear the sound of hoofs. So when it was passed he turned and cameaway home. Another time, " the man says, "my father told me he was in aboat out on the lake with two or three men from Gort, and one of themhad an eel-spear, and he thrust it into the water, and it hitsomething, and the man fainted and they had to carry him out of theboat to land, and when he came to himself he said that what he struckwas like a calf, but whatever it was, it was not fish!" A friend ofmine is convinced that these terrible creatures, so common in lakes, were set there in old times by subtle enchanters to watch over thegates of wisdom. He thinks that if we sent our spirits down into thewater we would make them of one substance with strange moods Of ecstasyand power, and go out it may be to the conquest of the world. We would, however, he believes, have first to outface and perhaps overthrowstrange images full of a more powerful life than if they were reallyalive. It may be that we shall look at them without fear when we haveendured the last adventure, that is death. 

1902. 

ARISTOTLE OF THE BOOKS

The friend who can get the wood-cutter to talk more readily than hewill to anybody else went lately to see his old wife. She lives in acottage not far from the edge of the woods, and is as full of old talkas her husband. This time she began to talk of Goban, the legendarymason, and his wisdom, but said presently, "Aristotle of the Books, too, was very wise, and he had a great deal of experience, but did notthe bees get the better of him in the end? He wanted to know how theypacked the comb, and he wasted the better part of a fortnight watchingthem, and he could not see them doing it. Then he made a hive with aglass cover on it and put it over them, and he thought to see. But whenhe went and put his eyes to the glass, they had it all covered with waxso that it was as black as the pot; and he was as blind as before. Hesaid he was never rightly kilt till then. They had him that timesurely!"

1902. 

THE SWINE OF THE GODS

A few years ago a friend of mine told me of something that happened tohim when he was a. Young man and out drilling with some ConnaughtFenians. They were but a car-full, and drove along a hillside untilthey came to a quiet place. They left the car and went further up thehill with their rifles, and drilled for a while. As they were comingdown again they saw a very thin, long-legged pig of the old Irish sort, and the pig began to follow them. One of them cried out as a joke thatit was a fairy pig, and they all began to run to keep up the joke. Thepig ran too, and presently, how nobody knew, this mock terror becamereal terror, and they ran as for their lives. When they got to the carthey made the horse gallop as fast as possible, but the pig stillfollowed. Then one of them put up his rifle to fire, but when he lookedalong the barrel he could see nothing. Presently they turned a cornerand came to a village. They told the people of the village what hadhappened, and the people of the village took pitchforks and spades andthe like, and went along the road with them to drive the pig away. Whenthey turned the comer they could not find anything. 

1902. 

A VOICE

One day I was walking over a bit of marshy ground close to Inchy Woodwhen I felt, all of a sudden, and only for a second, an emotion which Isaid to myself was the root of Christian mysticism. There had sweptover me a sense of weakness, of dependence on a great personal Beingsomewhere far off yet near at hand. No thought of mine had prepared mefor this emotion, for I had been pre-occupied with Aengus and Edain, andwith Mannanan, son of the sea. That night I awoke lying upon my backand hearing a voice speaking above me and saying, "No human soul islike any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any humansoul is infinite, for no other soul can satisfy the same need in God. "A few nights after this I awoke to see the loveliest people I have everseen. A young man and a young girl dressed in olive-green raiment, cutlike old Greek raiment, were standing at my bedside. I looked at thegirl and noticed that her dress was gathered about her neck into a kindof chain, or perhaps into some kind of stiff embroidery whichrepresented ivy-leaves. But what filled me with wonder was themiraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now. It wasbeautiful, as few faces are beautiful, but it had neither, one wouldthink, the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or inspeculation. It was peaceful like the faces of animals, or likemountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad. Ithought for a moment that she might be the beloved of Aengus, but howcould that hunted, alluring, happy, immortal wretch have a face likethis? Doubtless she was from among the children of the Moon, but whoamong them I shall never know. 

1902. 

KIDNAPPERS

A little north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of BenBulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white squarein the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand; no sheepor goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more inaccessibleplace upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to the deepconsidering. It is the door of faery-land. In the middle of night itswings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out. All night the gayrabble sweep to and fro across the land, invisible to all, unlessperhaps where, in some more than commonly "gentle" place--Drumcliff orDrum-a-hair--the nightcapped heads of faery-doctors may be thrust fromtheir doors to see what mischief the "gentry" are doing. To theirtrained eyes and ears the fields are covered by red-hatted riders, andthe air is full of shrill voices--a sound like whistling, as an ancientScottish seer has recorded, and wholly different from the talk of theangels, who "speak much in the throat, like the Irish, " as Lilly, theastrologer, has wisely said. If there be a new-born baby or new-wedbride in the neighbourhood, the nightcapped "doctors" will peer withmore than common care, for the unearthly troop do not always returnempty-handed. Sometimes a new-wed bride or a new-born baby goes withthem into their mountains; the door swings to behind, and the new-bornor the new-wed moves henceforth in the bloodless land of Faery; happyenough, but doomed to melt out at the last judgment like bright vapour, for the soul cannot live without sorrow. Through this door of whitestone, and the other doors of that land where geabheadh tu an sonas aerpighin ("you can buy joy for a penny"), have gone kings, queens, andprinces, but so greatly has the power of Faery dwindled, that there arenone but peasants in these sad chronicles of mine. 

Somewhere about the beginning of last century appeared at the westerncorner of Market Street, Sligo, where the butcher's shop now is, not apalace, as in Keats's Lamia, but an apothecary's shop, ruled over by acertain unaccountable Dr. Opendon. Where he came from, none ever knew. There also was in Sligo, in those days, a woman, Ormsby by name, whosehusband had fallen mysteriously sick. The doctors could make nothing ofhim. Nothing seemed wrong with him, yet weaker and weaker he grew. Awaywent the wife to Dr. Opendon. She was shown into the shop parlour. Ablack cat was sitting straight up before the fire. She had just time tosee that the side-board was covered with fruit, and to say to herself, "Fruit must be wholesome when the doctor has so much, " before Dr. Opendon came in. He was dressed all in black, the same as the cat, andhis wife walked behind him dressed in black likewise. She gave him aguinea, and got a little bottle in return. Her husband recovered thattime. Meanwhile the black doctor cured many people; but one day a richpatient died, and cat, wife, and doctor all vanished the night after. In a year the man Ormsby fell sick once more. Now he was a goodlookingman, and his wife felt sure the "gentry" were coveting him. She wentand called on the "faery-doctor" at Cairnsfoot. As soon as he had heardher tale, he went behind the back door and began muttering, muttering, muttering-making spells. Her husband got well this time also. But aftera while he sickened again, the fatal third time, and away went she oncemore to Cairnsfoot, and out went the faery-doctor behind his back doorand began muttering, but soon he came in and told her it was no use--her husband would die; and sure enough the man died, and ever afterwhen she spoke of him Mrs. Ormsby shook her head saying she knew wellwhere he was, and it wasn't in heaven or hell or purgatory either. Sheprobably believed that a log of wood was left behind in his place, butso bewitched that it seemed the dead body of her husband. 

She is dead now herself, but many still living remember her. She was, I believe, for a time a servant or else a kind of pensioner of somerelations of my own. 

Sometimes those who are carried off are allowed after many years--seven usually--a final glimpse of their friends. Many years ago a womanvanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with herhusband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he receivedword in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured byfaeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longingto see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to thepeasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being adutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets ofGlasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She washappy, she said, and had the best of good eating, and would he not eat?and therewith laid all kinds of food on the table; but he, knowing wellthat she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faeryfood, that she might keep him with her, refused and came home to hispeople in Sligo. 

Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond, a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, theHeart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wildduck. Out of this lake, as from the white square stone in Ben Bulben, issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one ofthem raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round, and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home tofind it was but faery glamour. To this hour on the border of the lakeis shown a half-dug trench--the signet of their impiety. A little wayfrom this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of faerykidnapping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, whosings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other asthough she remembered the dancing of her youth. 

A young man going at nightfall to the house of his just married bride, met in the way a jolly company, and with them his bride. They werefaeries, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band. Tohim they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when shesaw her old love, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest be shouldeat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into thatbloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards withthree of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until hesaw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms. Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowlyall that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to thehouse of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of thekeeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelicpoet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which mywhite-capped friend remembered and sang for me. 

Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to theliving, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of JohnKirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[FN#8] are a family much rumouredof in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man anda spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read thatthe mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe. 

[FN#8] I have since heard that it was not the Kirwans, but theirpredecessors at Castle Hacket, the Hackets themselves, I think, whowere descended from a man and a spirit, and were notable for beauty. Iimagine that the mother of Lord Cloncurry was descended from theHackets. It may well be that all through these stories the name ofKirwan has taken the place of the older name. Legend mixes everythingtogether in her cauldron. 

John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpoolwith a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. Thatevening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and askedwhere he was stabling his horse. In such and such a place, he answered. "Don't put him there, " said the slip of a boy; "that stable will beburnt to-night. " He took his horse elsewhere, and sure enough thestable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as reward toride as his jockey in the coming race, and then was gone. The race-timecame round. At the last moment the boy ran forward and mounted, saying, "If I strike him with the whip in my left hand I will lose, but if inmy right hand bet all you are worth. " For, said Paddy Flynn, who toldme the tale, "the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on makingthe sign of the cross with it, and all that, come Christmas, and aBanshee, or such like, would no more mind than if it was that broom. "Well, the slip of a boy struck the horse with his right hand, and JohnKirwan cleared the field out. When the race was over, "What can I dofor you now?" said he. "Nothing but this, " said the boy: "my mother hasa cottage on your land-they stole me from the cradle. Be good to her, John Kirwan, and wherever your horses go I will watch that no illfollows them; but you will never see me more. " With that he madehimself air, and vanished. 

Sometimes animals are carried off--apparently drowned animals morethan others. In Claremorris, Galway, Paddy Flynn told me, lived a poorwidow with one cow and its calf. The cow fell into the river, and waswashed away. There was a man thereabouts who went to a red-haired woman--for such are supposed to be wise in these things--and she told him totake the calf down to the edge of the river, and hide himself andwatch. He did as she had told him, and as evening came on the calfbegan to low, and after a while the cow came along the edge of theriver and commenced suckling it. Then, as he had been told, he caughtthe cow's tail. Away they went at a great pace across hedges andditches, till they came to a royalty (a name for the little circularditches, commonly called raths or forts, that Ireland is covered withsince Pagan times). Therein he saw walking or sitting all the peoplewho had died out of his village in his time. A woman was sitting on theedge with a child on her knees, and she called out to him to mind whatthe red-haired woman had told him, and he remembered she had said, Bleed the cow. So he stuck his knife into the cow and drew blood. Thatbroke the spell, and he was able to turn her homeward. "Do not forgetthe spancel, " said the woman with the child on her knees; "take theinside one. " There were three spancels on a bush; he took one, and thecow was driven safely home to the widow. 

There is hardly a valley or mountainside where folk cannot tell you ofsome one pillaged from amongst them. Two or three miles from the HeartLake lives an old woman who was stolen away in her youth. After sevenyears she was brought home again for some reason or other, but she hadno toes left. She had danced them off. Many near the white stone doorin Ben Bulben have been stolen away. 

It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country placesI could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening bythe scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faintmountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readilydiscovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures, the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, orfrom the Heart Lake in the south. 

THE UNTIRING ONES

It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have anyunmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is thisentanglement of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows anddeepens the furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with asgood heart as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor canthe circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegalpeasants remember this when they bend over the spade, or sit full ofthe heaviness of the fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and theytell stories about it that it may not be forgotten. A short while ago, they say, two faeries, little creatures, one like a young man, one likea young woman, came to a farmer's house, and spent the night sweepingthe hearth and setting all tidy. The next night they came again, andwhile the farmer was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into oneroom, and having arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeurit seems, they began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and dayswent by, and all the country-side came to look at them, but still theirfeet never tired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while;and after three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, andwent and told them that the priest was coming. The little creatureswhen they heard this went back to their own country, and there theirjoy shall last as long as the points of the rushes are brown, thepeople say, and that is until God shall burn up the world with a kiss. 

But it is not merely faeries who know untiring days, for there havebeen men and women who, falling under their enchantment, have attained, perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more thanfaery abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals havegone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty, blown hither and thither by the winds that awakened the stars, the dimkingdom has acknowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, andgiven them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village inthe south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat byrocking her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and saidthat the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the dimkingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old and diewhile he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would be giftedwith a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log out of thefire and bury it in the garden, and her child would live as long as itremained unconsumed. The mother buried the log, and the child grew up, became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries, who came to herat nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince died, and anotherprince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful peasant girl in histurn; and after another seven hundred years he died also, and anotherprince and another husband came in his stead, and so on until she hadhad seven husbands. At last one day the priest of the parish calledupon her, and told her that she was a scandal to the wholeneighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was verysorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him aboutthe log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and thenthey burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, andeverybody was pleased. Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare, [FN#9] whowent all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faerylife, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and laketo hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little LoughIa, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo. 

[FN#9] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which wouldmean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was avery famous person, perhaps the mother of the Gods herself. A friend ofmine found her, as he thinks frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lakeon a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or thestoryteller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many LoughLeaths. 

The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the logand Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelledhate and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with "yes" and"no, " or entangled their feet with the sorry net of "maybe" and"perhaps. " The great winds came and took them up into themselves. 

EARTH, FIRE AND WATER

Some French writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desertwent into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them whatthey are. I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to be evenyet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that theelements have their children. If we knew the Fire Worshippers better wemight find that their centuries of pious observance have been rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and I amcertain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mistand rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images formthemselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in somepool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the Godseverywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of thatcommunion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like storiesof all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our country people speak withthe dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understanddeath; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty intothe condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make ourminds so like still water that beings gather about us that they maysee, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with aclearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did notthe wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because ofwater, and that "even the generation of images in the mind is fromwater"?

1902. 

THE OLD TOWN

I fell, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the powerof faery. 

I had gone with a young man and his sister--friends and relations ofmy own--to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were cominghome talking over what he had told us. It was dark, and ourimaginations were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this mayhave brought us, unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping andwaking, where Sphinxes and Chimaeras sit open-eyed and where there arealways murmurings and whisperings. I cannot think that what we saw wasan imagination of the waking mind. We had come under some trees thatmade the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light moving slowlyacross the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not seeanything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge ofthe river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was aruined church covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called"the Old Town, " which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell'sday. We had stood for some few minutes, so far as I can recollect, looking over the fields full of stones and brambles and elder-bushes, when I saw a small bright light on the horizon, as it seemed, mountingup slowly towards the sky; then we saw other faint lights for a minuteor two, and at last a bright flame like the flame of a torch movingrapidly over the river. We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems allso unreal, that I have never written of it until now, and hardly everspoken of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasoningimpulse, I have avoided giving it weight in the argument. Perhaps Ihave felt that my recollections of things seen when the sense ofreality was weakened must be untrustworthy. A few months ago, however, I talked it over with my two friends, and compared their somewhatmeagre recollections with my own. That sense of unreality was all themore wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable aswere those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I rememberthem with perfect distinctness and confidence. The girl was sittingreading under a large old-fashioned mirror, and I was reading andwriting a couple of yards away, when I heard a sound as if a shower ofpeas had been thrown against the mirror, and while I was looking at itI heard the sound again, and presently, while I was alone in the room, I heard a sound as if something much bigger than a pea had struck thewainscoting beside my head. And after that for some days came othersights and sounds, not to me but to the girl, her brother, and theservants. Now it was a bright light, now it was letters of fire thatvanished before they could be read, now it was a heavy foot movingabout in the seemingly empty house. One wonders whether creatures wholive, the country people believe, wherever men and women have lived inearlier times, followed us from the ruins of the old town? or did theycome from the banks of the river by the trees where the first lighthad shone for a moment?

1902. 

THE MAN AND HIS BOOTS

There was a doubter in Donegal, and he would not hear of ghosts orsheogues, and there was a house in Donegal that had been haunted aslong as man could remember, and this is the story of how the house gotthe better of the man. The man came into the house and lighted a firein the room under the haunted one, and took off his boots and set themOn the hearth, and stretched out his feet and warmed him self. For atime he prospered in his unbelief; but a little while after the nighthad fallen, and everything had got very dark, one of his boots began tomove. It got up off the floor and gave a kind of slow jump towards thedoor, and then the other boot did the same, and after that the firstboot jumped again. And thereupon it struck the man that an invisiblebeing had got into his boots, and was now going away in them. When theboots reached the door they went up-stairs slowly, and then the manheard them go tramp, tramp round the haunted room over his head. A fewminutes passed, and he could hear them again upon the stairs, and afterthat in the passage outside, and then one of them came in at the door, and the other gave a jump past it and came in too. They jumped alongtowards him, and then one got up and hit him, and afterwards the otherhit him, and then again the first hit him, and so on, until they drovehim out of the room, and finally out of the house. In this way he waskicked out by his own boots, and Donegal was avenged upon its doubter. It is not recorded whether the invisible being was a ghost or one ofthe Sidhe, but the fantastic nature of the vengeance is like the workof the Sidhe who live in the heart of fantasy. 

A COWARD

One day I was at the house of my friend the strong farmer, who livesbeyond Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain, and met there a young lad whoseemed to be disliked by the two daughters. I asked why they dislikedhim, and was; told he was a coward. This interested me, for some whomrobust children of nature take to be cowards are but men and women witha nervous system too finely made for their life and work. I looked atthe lad; but no, that pink-and-white face and strong body had nothingof undue sensibility. After a little he told me his story. He had liveda wild and reckless life, until one day, two years before, he wascoming home late at night, and suddenly fell himself sinking in, as itwere, upon the ghostly world. For a moment he saw the face of a deadbrother rise up before him, and then he turned and ran. He did not stoptill he came to a cottage nearly a mile down the road. He flung himselfagainst the door with so much of violence that he broke the thickwooden bolt and fell upon the floor. From that day he gave up his wildlife, but was a hopeless coward. Nothing could ever bring him to look, either by day or night, upon the spot where he had seen the face, andhe often went two miles round to avoid it; nor could, he said, "theprettiest girl in the country" persuade him to see her home after aparty if he were alone. He feared everything, for he had looked at theface no man can see unchanged-the imponderable face of a spirit. 

THE THREE O'BYRNES AND THE EVIL FAERIES

In the dim kingdom there is a great abundance of all excellent things. There is more love there than upon the earth; there is more dancingthere than upon the earth; and there is more treasure there than uponthe earth. In the beginning the earth was perhaps made to fulfil thedesire of man, but now it has got old and fallen into decay. Whatwonder if we try and pilfer the treasures of that other kingdom!

A friend was once at a village near Sleive League. One day he wasstraying about a rath called "Cashel Nore. " A man with a haggard faceand unkempt hair, and clothes falling in pieces, came into the rath andbegan digging. My friend turned to a peasant who was working near andasked who the man was. "That is the third O'Byrne, " was the answer. Afew days after he learned this story: A great quantity of treasure hadbeen buried in the rath in pagan times, and a number of evil faeriesset to guard it; but some day it was to be found and belong to thefamily of the O'Byrnes. Before that day three O'Byrnes must find it anddie. Two had already done so. The first had dug and dug until at lasthe had got a glimpse of the stone coffin that contained it, butimmediately a thing like a huge hairy dog came down the mountain andtore him to pieces. The next morning the treasure had again vanisheddeep into the earth. The second O'Byrne came and dug and dug until hefound the coffer, and lifted the lid and saw the gold shining within. He saw some horrible sight the next moment, and went raving mad andsoon died. The treasure again sank out of sight. The third O'Byrne isnow digging. He believes that he will die in some terrible way themoment he finds the treasure, but that the spell will be broken, andthe O'Byrne family made rich for ever, as they were of old. 

A peasant of the neighbourhood once saw the treasure. He found theshin-bone of a hare lying on the grass. He took it up; there was a holein it; he looked through the hole, and saw the gold heaped up under theground. He hurried home to bring a spade, but when he got to the rathagain he could not find the spot where he had seen it. 

DRUMCLIFF AND ROSSES

Drumcliff and Rosses were, are, and ever shall be, please Heaven!places of unearthly resort. I have lived near by them and in them, timeafter time, and have gathered thus many a crumb of faery lore. Drumcliff is a wide green valley, lying at the foot of Ben Bulben, themountain in whose side the square white door swings open at nightfallto loose the faery riders on the world. The great St. Columba himself, the builder of many of the old ruins in the valley, climbed themountains on one notable day to get near heaven with his prayers. Rosses is a little sea-dividing, sandy plain, covered with short grass, like a green tablecloth, and lying in the foam midway between the roundcairn-headed Knocknarea and "Ben Bulben, famous for hawks":

 But for Benbulben and Knocknarea Many a poor sailor'd be cast away, as the rhyme goes. 

At the northern corner of Rosses is a little promontory of sand androcks and grass: a mournful, haunted place. No wise peasant would fallasleep under its low cliff, for he who sleeps here may wake "silly, "the "good people" having carried off his soul. There is no more readyshortcut to the dim kingdom than this plovery headland, for, coveredand smothered now from sight by mounds of sand, a long cave goesthither "full of gold and silver, and the most beautiful parlours anddrawing-rooms. " Once, before the sand covered it, a dog strayed in, andwas heard yelping helplessly deep underground in a fort far inland. These forts or raths, made before modern history had begun, cover allRosses and all Columkille. The one where the dog yelped has, like mostothers, an underground beehive chamber in the midst. Once when I waspoking about there, an unusually intelligent and "reading" peasant whohad come with me, and waited outside, knelt down by the opening, andwhispered in a timid voice, "Are you all right, sir?" I had been somelittle while underground, and he feared I had been carried off like thedog. 

No wonder he was afraid, for the fort has long been circled by ill-boding rumours. It is on the ridge of a small hill, on whose northernslope lie a few stray cottages. One night a farmer's young son camefrom one of them and saw the fort all flaming, and ran towards it, butthe "glamour" fell on him, and he sprang on to a fence, cross-legged, and commenced beating it with a stick, for he imagined the fence was ahorse, and that all night long he went on the most wonderful ridethrough the country. In the morning he was still beating his fence, andthey carried him home, where he remained a simpleton for three yearsbefore he came to himself again. A little later a farmer tried to levelthe fort. His cows and horses died, and an manner of trouble overtookhim, and finally he himself was led home, and left useless with "hishead on his knees by the fire to the day of his death. "

A few hundred yards southwards of the northern angle of Rosses isanother angle having also its cave, though this one is not covered withsand. About twenty years ago a brig was wrecked near by, and three orfour fishermen were put to watch the deserted hulk through thedarkness. At midnight they saw sitting on a stone at the cave's mouthtwo red-capped fiddlers fiddling with all their might. The men fled. Agreat crowd of villagers rushed down to the cave to see the fiddlers, but the creatures had gone. 

To the wise peasant the green hills and woods round him are full ofnever-fading mystery. When the aged countrywoman stands at her door inthe evening, and, in her own words, "looks at the mountains and thinksof the goodness of God, " God is all the nearer, because the paganpowers are not far: because northward in Ben Bulben, famous for hawks, the white square door swings open at sundown, and those wildunchristian riders rush forth upon the fields, while southward theWhite Lady, who is doubtless Maive herself, wanders under the broadcloud nightcap of Knocknarea. How may she doubt these things, eventhough the priest shakes his head at her? Did not a herd-boy, no longwhile since, see the White Lady? She passed so close that the skirt ofher dress touched him. "He fell down, and was dead three days. " Butthis is merely the small gossip of faerydom--the little stitches thatjoin this world and the other. 

One night as I sat eating Mrs. H-----'s soda-bread, her husband toldme a longish story, much the best of all I heard in Rosses. Many a poorman from Fin M'Cool to our own days has had some such adventure to tellof, for those creatures, the "good people, " love to repeat themselves. At any rate the story-tellers do. "In the times when we used to travelby the canal, " he said, "I was coming down from Dublin. When we came toMullingar the canal ended, and I began to walk, and stiff and fatiguedI was after the slowness. I had some friends with me, and now and thenwe walked, now and then we rode in a cart. So on till we saw some girlsmilking cows, and stopped to joke with them. After a while we askedthem for a drink of milk. 'We have nothing to put it in here, ' theysaid, 'but come to the house with us. ' We went home with them, and satround the fire talking. After a while the others went, and left me, loath to stir from the good fire. I asked the girls for something toeat. There was a pot on the fire, and they took the meat out and put iton a plate, and told me to eat only the meat that came off the head. When I had eaten, the girls went out, and I did not see them again. Itgrew darker and darker, and there I still sat, loath as ever to leavethe good fire, and after a while two men came in, carrying between thema corpse. When I saw them, coming I hid behind the door. Says one tothe other, putting the corpse on the spit, 'Who'll turn the spit? Saysthe other, 'Michael H-----, come out of that and turn the meat. ' I cameout all of a tremble, and began turning the spit. 'Michael H------, 'says the one who spoke first, 'if you let it burn we'll have to put youon the spit instead'; and on that they went out. I sat there tremblingand turning the corpse till towards midnight. The men came again, andthe one said it was burnt, and the other said it was done right. Buthaving fallen out over it, they both said they would do me no harm thattime; and, sitting by the fire, one of them cried out: 'Michael H-----, can you tell me a story?' 'Divil a one, ' said I. On which he caught meby the shoulder, and put me out like a shot. It was a wild blowingnight. Never in all my born days did I see such a night-the darkestnight that ever came out of the heavens. I did not know where I was forthe life of me. So when one of the men came after me and touched me onthe shoulder, with a 'Michael H----, can you tell a story now?' 'Ican, ' says I. In he brought me; and putting me by the fire, says:'Begin. ' 'I have no story but the one, ' says I, 'that I was sittinghere, and you two men brought in a corpse and put it on the spit, andset me turning it. ' 'That will do, ' says he; 'ye may go in there andlie down on the bed. ' And I went, nothing loath; and in the morningwhere was I but in the middle of a green field!"

"Drumcliff" is a great place for omens. Before a prosperous fishingseason a herring-barrel appears in the midst of a storm-cloud; and at aplace called Columkille's Strand, a place of marsh and mire, an ancientboat, with St. Columba himself, comes floating in from sea on amoonlight night: a portent of a brave harvesting. They have their dreadportents too. Some few seasons ago a fisherman saw, far on the horizon, renowned Hy Brazel, where he who touches shall find no more labour orcare, nor cynic laughter, but shall go walking about under shadiestboscage, and enjoy the conversation of Cuchullin and his heroes. Avision of Hy Brazel forebodes national troubles. 

Drumcliff and Rosses are chokeful of ghosts. By bog, road, rath, hillside, sea-border they gather in all shapes: headless women, men inarmour, shadow hares, fire-tongued hounds, whistling seals, and so on. A whistling seal sank a ship the other day. At Drumcliff there is avery ancient graveyard. The Annals of the Four Masters have this verseabout a soldier named Denadhach, who died in 871: "A pious soldier ofthe race of Con lies under hazel crosses at Drumcliff. " Not very longago an old woman, turning to go into the churchyard at night to pray, saw standing before her a man in armour, who asked her where she wasgoing. It was the "pious soldier of the race of Con, " says localwisdom, still keeping watch, with his ancient piety, over thegraveyard. Again, the custom is still common hereabouts of sprinklingthe doorstep with the blood of a chicken on the death of a very youngchild, thus (as belief is) drawing into the blood the evil spirits fromthe too weak soul. Blood is a great gatherer of evil spirits. To cutyour hand on a stone on going into a fort is said to be very dangerous. 

There is no more curious ghost in Drumcliff or Rosses than the snipe-ghost. There is a bush behind a house in a village that I know well:for excellent reasons I do not say whether in Drumcliff or Rosses or onthe slope of Ben Bulben, or even on the plain round Knocknarea. Thereis a history concerning the house and the bush. A man once lived therewho found on the quay of Sligo a package containing three hundredpounds in notes. It was dropped by a foreign sea captain. This my manknew, but said nothing. It was money for freight, and the sea captain, not daring to face his owners, committed suicide in mid-ocean. Shortlyafterwards my man died. His soul could not rest. At any rate, strangesounds were heard round his house, though that had grown and prosperedsince the freight money. The wife was often seen by those still aliveout in the garden praying at the bush I have spoken of, for the shadeof the dead man appeared there at times. The bush remains to this day:once portion of a hedge, it now stands by itself, for no one dare putspade or pruning-knife about it. As to the strange sounds and voices, they did not cease till a few years ago, when, during some repairs, asnipe flew out of the solid plaster and away; the troubled ghost, saythe neighbours, of the note-finder was at last dislodged. 

My forebears and relations have lived near Rosses and Drumcliff thesemany years. A few miles northward I am wholly a stranger, and can findnothing. When I ask for stories of the faeries, my answer is some suchas was given me by a woman who lives near a white stone fort--one ofthe few stone ones in Ireland--under the seaward angle of Ben Bulben:"They always mind their own affairs and I always mind mine": for it isdangerous to talk of the creatures. Only friendship for yourself orknowledge of your forebears will loosen these cautious tongues. Myfriend, "the sweet Harp-String" (I give no more than his Irish name forfear of gaugers), has the science of unpacking the stubbornest heart, but then he supplies the potheen-makers with grain from his own fields. Besides, he is descended from a noted Gaelic magician who raised the"dhoul" in Great Eliza's century, and he has a kind of prescriptiveright to hear tell of all kind of other-world creatures. They arealmost relations of his, if all people say concerning the parentage ofmagicians be true. 

THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE

I

Once a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in thecemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made themfeel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egilhimself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blowswith a hammer. It got white where the blows fell but did not break, andthey were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet, andworthy of every honour. In Ireland we have much kinship with theIcelanders, or "Danes" as we call them and all other dwellers in theScandinavian countries. In some of our mountainous and barren places, and in our seaboard villages, we still test each other in much the sameway the Icelanders tested the head of Egil. We may have acquired thecustom from those ancient Danish pirates, whose descendants the peopleof Rosses tell me still remember every field and hillock in Irelandwhich once belonged to their forebears, and are able to describe Rossesitself as well as any native. There is one seaboard district known asRoughley, where the men are never known to shave or trim their wild redbeards, and where there is a fight ever on foot. I have seen them at aboat-race fall foul of each other, and after much loud Gaelic, strikeeach other with oars. The first boat had gone aground, and by dint ofhitting out with the long oars kept the second boat from passing, onlyto give the victory to the third. One day the Sligo people say a manfrom Roughley was tried in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row, andmade the defence not unknown in Ireland, that some heads are so thinyou cannot be responsible for them. Having turned with a look ofpassionate contempt towards the solicitor who was prosecuting, andcried, "that little fellow's skull if ye were to hit it would go likean egg-shell, " he beamed upon the judge, and said in a wheedling voice, "but a man might wallop away at your lordship's for a fortnight. "

II

I wrote all this years ago, out of what were even then old memories. I was in Roughley the other day, and found it much like other desolateplaces. I may have been thinking of Moughorow, a much wilder place, forthe memories of one's childhood are brittle things to lean upon. 

1902. 

THE RELIGION OF A SAILOR

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from hisdeck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in thevalley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget allthings except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadowunder the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness mustneeds think and think. One July a couple of years ago I took my supperwith a Captain Moran on board the S. S. Margaret, that had put into awestern river from I know not where. I found him a man of many notionsall flavoured with his personality, as is the way with sailors. Hetalked in his queer sea manner of God and the world, and up through allhis words broke the hard energy of his calling. 

"Sur, " said he, "did you ever hear tell of the sea captain's prayer?"

"No, " said I; "what is it?"

"It is, " he replied, "'O Lord, give me a stiff upper lip. '"

"And what does that mean?"

"It means, " he said, "that when they come to me some night and wake meup, and say, 'Captain, we're going down, ' that I won't make a fool o'meself. Why, sur, we war in mid Atlantic, and I standin' on the bridge, when the third mate comes up to me looking mortial bad. Says he, 'Captain, all's up with us. ' Says I, 'Didn't you know when you joinedthat a certain percentage go down every year?' 'Yes, sur, ' says he; andsays I, 'Arn't you paid to go down?' 'Yes, sur, ' says he; and says I, 'Then go down like a man, and be damned to you!"'

CONCERNING THE NEARNESS TOGETHER OF HEAVEN, EARTH, AND PURGATORY

In Ireland this world and the world we go to after death are not farapart. I have heard of a ghost that was many years in a tree and manyyears in the archway of a bridge, and my old Mayo woman says, "There isa bush up at my own place, and the people do be saying that there aretwo souls doing their penance under it. When the wind blows one way theone has shelter, and when it blows from the north the other has theshelter. It is twisted over with the way they be rooting under it forshelter. I don't believe it, but there is many a one would not pass byit at night. " Indeed there are times when the worlds are so neartogether that it seems as if our earthly chattels were no more than theshadows of things beyond. A lady I knew once saw a village childrunning about with a long trailing petticoat upon her, and asked thecreature why she did not have it cut short. "It was my grandmother's, "said the child; "would you have her going about yonder with herpetticoat up to her knees, and she dead but four days?" I have read astory of a woman whose ghost haunted her people because they had madeher grave-clothes so short that the fires of purgatory burned herknees. The peasantry expect to have beyond the grave houses much liketheir earthly homes, only there the thatch will never grow leaky, northe white walls lose their lustre, nor shall the dairy be at any timeempty of good milk and butter. But now and then a landlord or an agentor a gauger will go by begging his bread, to show how God divides therighteous from the unrighteous. 

1892 and 1902. 

THE EATERS OF PRECIOUS STONES

Sometimes when I have been shut off from common interests, and havefor a little forgotten to be restless, I get waking dreams, now faintand shadow-like, now vivid and solid-looking, like the material worldunder my feet. Whether they be faint or vivid, they are ever beyond thepower of my will to alter in any way. They have their own will, andsweep hither and thither, and change according to its commands. One dayI saw faintly an immense pit of blackness, round which went a circularparapet, and on this parapet sat innumerable apes eating preciousstones out of the palms of their hands. The stones glittered green andcrimson, and the apes devoured them with an insatiable hunger. I knewthat I saw the Celtic Hell, and my own Hell, the Hell of the artist, and that all who sought after beautiful and wonderful things with tooavid a thirst, lost peace and form and became shapeless and common. Ihave seen into other people's hells also, and saw in one an infernalPeter, who had a black face and white lips, and who weighed on acurious double scales not only the evil deeds committed, but the gooddeeds left undone, of certain invisible shades. I could see the scalesgo up and down, but I could not see the shades who were, I knew, crowding about him. I saw on another occasion a quantity of demons ofall kinds of shapes--fish-like, serpent-like, ape-like, and dog-like--sitting about a black pit such as that in my own Hell, and looking ata moon--like reflection of the Heavens which shone up from the depthsof the pit. 

OUR LADY OF THE HILLS

When we were children we did not say at such a distance from the post-office, or so far from the butcher's or the grocer's, but measuredthings by the covered well in the wood, or by the burrow of the fox inthe hill. We belonged then to God and to His works, and to things comedown from the ancient days. We would not have been greatly surprisedhad we met the shining feet of an angel among the white mushrooms uponthe mountains, for we knew in those days immense despair, unfathomedlove--every eternal mood, --but now the draw-net is about our feet. Afew miles eastward of Lough Gill, a young Protestant girl, who was bothpretty herself and prettily dressed in blue and white, wandered upamong those mountain mushrooms, and I have a letter of hers telling howshe met a troop of children, and became a portion of their dream. Whenthey first saw her they threw themselves face down in a bed of rushes, as if in a great fear; but after a little other children came aboutthem, and they got up and followed her almost bravely. She noticedtheir fear, and presently stood still and held out her arms. A littlegirl threw herself into them with the cry, "Ah, you are the Virgin outo' the picture!" "No, " said another, coming near also, "she is a skyfaery, for she has the colour of the sky. " "No, " said a third, "she isthe faery out of the foxglove grown big. " The other children, however, would have it that she was indeed the Virgin, for she wore the Virgin'scolours. Her good Protestant heart was greatly troubled, and she gotthe children to sit down about her, and tried to explain who she was, but they would have none of her explanation. Finding explanation of noavail, she asked had they ever heard of Christ? "Yes, " said one; "butwe do not like Him, for He would kill us if it were not for theVirgin. " "Tell Him to be good to me, " whispered another into her ear. "We would not let me near Him, for dad says I am a divil, " burst out athird. 

She talked to them a long time about Christ and the apostles, but wasfinally interrupted by an elderly woman with a stick, who, taking herto be some adventurous hunter for converts, drove the children away, despite their explanation that here was the great Queen of Heaven cometo walk upon the mountain and be kind to them. When the children hadgone she went on her way, and had walked about half-a-mile, when thechild who was called "a divil" jumped down from the high ditch by thelane, and said she would believe her "an ordinary lady" if she had "twoskirts, " for "ladies always had two skirts. " The "two skirts" wereshown, and the child went away crestfallen, but a few minutes laterjumped down again from the ditch, and cried angrily, "Dad's a divil, mum's a divil, and I'm a divil, and you are only an ordinary lady, " andhaving flung a handful of mud and pebbles ran away sobbing. When mypretty Protestant had come to her own home she found that she haddropped the tassels of her parasol. A year later she was by chance uponthe mountain, but wearing now a plain black dress, and met the childwho had first called her the Virgin out o' the picture, and saw thetassels hanging about the child's neck, and said, "I am the lady youmet last year, who told you about Christ. " "No, you are not! no, youare not! no, you are not!" was the passionate reply. And after all, itwas not my pretty Protestant, but Mary, Star of the Sea, still walkingin sadness and in beauty upon many a mountain and by many a shore, whocast those tassels at the feet of the child. It is indeed fitting thatman pray to her who is the mother of peace, the mother of dreams, andthe mother of purity, to leave them yet a little hour to do good andevil in, and to watch old Time telling the rosary of the stars. 

THE GOLDEN AGE

A while ago I was in the train, and getting near Sligo. The last timeI had been there something was troubling me, and I had longed for amessage from those beings or bodiless moods, or whatever they be, whoinhabit the world of spirits. The message came, for one night I sawwith blinding distinctness a black animal, half weasel, half dog, moving along the top of a stone wall, and presently the black animalvanished, and from the other side came a white weasel-like dog, hispink flesh shining through his white hair and all in a blaze of light;and I remembered a pleasant belief about two faery dogs who go aboutrepresenting day and night, good and evil, and was comforted by theexcellent omen. But now I longed for a message of another kind, andchance, if chance there is, brought it, for a man got into the carriageand began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangestemotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the GoldenAge. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like abeautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together andflung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect andkindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buriedlike a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and themore innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over ourfallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the songof the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of thefiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and theclever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marredby a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, andthat the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if onlythey who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for thesad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we mustweep until the Eternal gates swing open. 

We were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and thefiddler put away his old blacking-box and held out his hat for acopper, and then opened the door and was gone. 

A REMONSTRANCE WITH SCOTSMEN FOR HAVING SOURED THE DISPOSITION OFTHEIR GHOSTS AND FAERIES

Not only in Ireland is faery belief still extant. It was only theother day I heard of a Scottish farmer who believed that the lake infront of his house was haunted by a water-horse. He was afraid of it, and dragged the lake with nets, and then tried to pump it empty. Itwould have been a bad thing for the water-horse had he found him. AnIrish peasant would have long since come to terms with the creature. For in Ireland there is something of timid affection between men andspirits. They only ill-treat each other in reason. Each admits theother side to have feelings. There are points beyond which neither willgo. No Irish peasant would treat a captured faery as did the manCampbell tells of. He caught a kelpie, and tied her behind him on hishorse. She was fierce, but he kept her quiet by driving an awl and aneedle into her. They came to a river, and she grew very restless, fearing to cross the water. Again he drove the awl and needle into her. She cried out, "Pierce me with the awl, but keep that slender, hair-like slave (the needle) out of me. " They came to an inn. He turned thelight of a lantern on her; immediately she dropped down like a fallingstar, and changed into a lump of jelly. She was dead. Nor would theytreat the faeries as one is treated in an old Highland poem. A faeryloved a little child who used to cut turf at the side of a faery hill. Every day the faery put out his hand from the hill with an enchantedknife. The child used to cut the turf with the knife. It did not takelong, the knife being charmed. Her brothers wondered why she was doneso quickly. At last they resolved to watch, and find out who helpedher. They saw the small hand come out of the earth, and the littlechild take from it the knife. When the turf was all cut, they saw hermake three taps on the ground with the handle. The small hand came outof the hill. Snatching the knife from the child, they cut the hand offwith a blow. The faery was never again seen. He drew his bleeding arminto the earth, thinking, as it is recorded, he had lost his handthrough the treachery of the child. 

In Scotland you are too theological, too gloomy. You have made eventhe Devil religious. "Where do you live, good-wyf, and how is theminister?" he said to the witch when he met her on the high-road, as itcame out in the trial. You have burnt all the witches. In Ireland wehave left them alone. To be sure, the "loyal minority" knocked out theeye of one with a cabbage-stump on the 31st of March, 1711, in the townof Carrickfergus. But then the "loyal minority" is half Scottish. Youhave discovered the faeries to be pagan and wicked. You would like tohave them all up before the magistrate. In Ireland warlike mortals havegone amongst them, and helped them in their battles, and they in turnhave taught men great skill with herbs, and permitted some few to heartheir tunes. Carolan slept upon a faery rath. Ever after their tunesran in his head, and made him the great musician he was. In Scotlandyou have denounced them from the pulpit. In Ireland they have beenpermitted by the priests to consult them on the state of their souls. Unhappily the priests have decided that they have no souls, that theywill dry up like so much bright vapour at the last day; but more insadness than in anger they have said it. The Catholic religion likes tokeep on good terms with its neighbours. 

These two different ways of looking at things have influenced in eachcountry the whole world of sprites and goblins. For their gay andgraceful doings you must go to Ireland; for their deeds of terror toScotland. Our Irish faery terrors have about them something of make-believe. When a peasant strays into an enchanted hovel, and is made toturn a corpse all night on a spit before the fire, we do not feelanxious; we know he will wake in the midst of a green field, the dew onhis old coat. In Scotland it is altogether different. You have souredthe naturally excellent disposition of ghosts and goblins. The piperM'Crimmon, of the Hebrides, shouldered his pipes, and marched into asea cavern, playing loudly, and followed by his dog. For a long timethe people could hear the pipes. He must have gone nearly a mile, whenthey heard the sound of a struggle. Then the piping ceased suddenly. Some time went by, and then his dog came out of the cavern completelyflayed, too weak even to howl. Nothing else ever came out of thecavern. Then there is the tale of the man who dived into a lake wheretreasure was thought to be. He saw a great coffer of iron. Close to thecoffer lay a monster, who warned him to return whence he came. He roseto the surface; but the bystanders, when they heard he had seen thetreasure, persuaded him to dive again. He dived. In a little while hisheart and liver floated up, reddening the water. No man ever saw therest of his body. 

These water-goblins and water-monsters are common in Scottish folk-lore. We have them too, but take them much less dreadfully. Our talesturn all their doings to favour and to prettiness, or hopelesslyhumorize the creatures. A hole in the Sligo river is haunted by one ofthese monsters. He is ardently believed in by many, but that does notprevent the peasantry playing with the subject, and surrounding it withconscious fantasies. When I was a small boy I fished one day forcongers in the monster hole. Returning home, a great eel on myshoulder, his head flapping down in front, his tail sweeping the groundbehind, I met a fisherman of my acquaintance. I began a tale of animmense conger, three times larger than the one I carried, that hadbroken my line and escaped. "That was him, " said the fisherman. "Didyou ever hear how he made my brother emigrate? My brother was a diver, you know, and grubbed stones for the Harbour Board. One day the beastcomes up to him, and says, 'What are you after?' 'Stones, sur, ' sayshe. 'Don't you think you had better be going?' 'Yes, sur, ' says he. Andthat's why my brother emigrated. The people said it was because he gotpoor, but that's not true. "

You--you will make no terms with the spirits of fire and earth and airand water. You have made the Darkness your enemy. We--we exchangecivilities with the world beyond. 

WAR

When there was a rumour of war with France a while ago, I met a poorSligo woman, a soldier's widow, that I know, and I read her a sentenceout of a letter I had just had from London: "The people here are madfor war, but France seems inclined to take things peacefully, " or somelike sentence. Her mind ran a good deal on war, which she imaginedpartly from what she had heard from soldiers, and partly from traditionof the rebellion of '98, but the word London doubled her interest, forshe knew there were a great many people in London, and she herself hadonce lived in "a congested district. " "There are too many over oneanother in London. They are getting tired of the world. It is killedthey want to be. It will be no matter; but sure the French want nothingbut peace and quietness. The people here don't mind the war coming. They could not be worse than they are. They may as well die soldierlybefore God. Sure they will get quarters in heaven. " Then she began tosay that it would be a hard thing to see children tossed about onbayonets, and I knew her mind was running on traditions of the greatrebellion. She said presently, "I never knew a man that was in a battlethat liked to speak of it after. They'd sooner be throwing hay downfrom a hayrick. " She told me how she and her neighbours used to besitting over the fire when she was a girl, talking of the war that wascoming, and now she was afraid it was coming again, for she had dreamedthat all the bay was "stranded and covered with seaweed. " I asked herif it was in the Fenian times that she had been so much afraid of warcoming. But she cried out, "Never had I such fun and pleasure as in theFenian times. I was in a house where some of the officers used to bestaying, and in the daytime I would be walking after the soldiers'band, and at night I'd be going down to the end of the garden watchinga soldier, with his red coat on him, drilling the Fenians in the fieldbehind the house. One night the boys tied the liver of an old horse, that had been dead three weeks, to the knocker, and I found it when Iopened the door in the morning. " And presently our talk of war shifted, as it had a way of doing, to the battle of the Black Pig, which seemsto her a battle between Ireland and England, but to me an Armageddonwhich shall quench all things in the Ancestral Darkness again, and fromthis to sayings about war and vengeance. "Do you know, " she said, "whatthe curse of the Four Fathers is? They put the man-child on the spear, and somebody said to them, 'You will be cursed in the fourth generationafter you, ' and that is why disease or anything always comes in thefourth generation. "

1902. 

THE QUEEN AND THE FOOL

I have heard one Hearne, a witch-doctor, who is on the border of Clareand Galway, say that in "every household" of faery "there is a queenand a fool, " and that if you are "touched" by either you never recover, though you may from the touch of any other in faery. He said of thefool that he was "maybe the wisest of all, " and spoke of him as dressedlike one of the "mummers that used to be going about the country. "Since then a friend has gathered me some few stories of him, and I haveheard that he is known, too, in the highlands. I remember seeing along, lank, ragged man sitting by the hearth in the cottage of an oldmiller not far from where I am now writing, and being told that he wasa fool; and I find from the stories that my friend has gathered that heis believed to go to faery in his sleep; but whether he becomes anAmadan-na-Breena, a fool of the forth, and is attached to a householdthere, I cannot tell. It was an old woman that I know well, and who hasbeen in faery herself, that spoke of him. She said, "There are foolsamongst them, and the fools we see, like that Amadan of Ballylee, goaway with them at night, and so do the woman fools that we callOinseachs (apes). " A woman who is related to the witch-doctor on theborder of Clare, and who can Cure people and cattle by spells, said, "There are some cures I can't do. I can't help any one that has got astroke from the queen or the fool of the forth. I knew of a woman thatsaw the queen one time, and she looked like any Christian. I neverheard of any that saw the fool but one woman that was walking nearGort, and she called out, 'There's the fool of the forth coming afterme. ' So her friends that were with her called out, though they couldsee nothing, and I suppose he went away at that, for she got no harm. He was like a big strong man, she said, and half naked, and that is allshe said about him. I have never seen any myself, but I am a cousin ofHearne, and my uncle was away twenty-one years. " The wife of the oldmiller said, "It is said they are mostly good neighbours, but thestroke of the fool is what there is no cure for; any one that gets thatis gone. The Amadan-na-Breena we call him!" And an old woman who livesin the Bog of Kiltartan, and is very poor, said, "It is true enough, there is no cure for the stroke of the Amadan-na-Breena. There was anold man I knew long ago, he had a tape, and he could tell what diseasesyou had with measuring you; and he knew many things. And he said to meone time, 'What month of the year is the worst?' and I said, 'The monthof May, of course. ' 'It is not, ' he said; 'but the month of June, forthat's the month that the Amadan gives his stroke!' They say he lookslike any other man, but he's leathan (wide), and not smart. I knew aboy one time got a great fright, for a lamb looked over the wall at himwith a beard on it, and he knew it was the Amadan, for it was the monthof June. And they brought him to that man I was telling about, that hadthe tape, and when he saw him he said, 'Send for the priest, and get aMass said over him. ' And so they did, and what would you say but he'sliving yet and has a family! A certain Regan said, 'They, the othersort of people, might be passing you close here and they might touchyou. But any that gets the touch of the Amadan-na-Breena is done for. 'It's true enough that it's in the month of June he's most likely togive the touch. I knew one that got it, and he told me about ithimself. He was a boy I knew well, and he told me that one night agentleman came to him, that had been his land-lord, and that was dead. And he told him to come along with him, for he wanted him to fightanother man. And when he went he found two great troops of them, andthe other troop had a living man with them too, and he was put to fighthim. And they had a great fight, and he got the better of the otherman, and then the troop on his side gave a great shout, and he was lefthome again. But about three years after that he was cutting bushes in awood and he saw the Amadan coming at him. He had a big vessel in hisarms, and it was shining, so that the boy could see nothing else; buthe put it behind his back then and came running, and the boy said helooked wild and wide, like the side of the hill. And the boy ran, andhe threw the vessel after him, and it broke with a great noise, andwhatever came out of it, his head was gone there and then. He lived fora while after, and used to tell us many things, but his wits were gone. He thought they mightn't have liked him to beat the other man, and heused to be afraid something would come on him. " And an old woman in aGalway workhouse, who had some little knowledge of Queen Maive, saidthe other day, "The Amadan-na-Breena changes his shape every two days. Sometimes he comes like a youngster, and then he'll come like the worstof beasts, trying to give the touch he used to be. I heard it said oflate he was shot, but I think myself it would be hard to shoot him. "

I knew a man who was trying to bring before his mind's eye an image ofAengus, the old Irish god of love and poetry and ecstasy, who changedfour of his kisses into birds, and suddenly the image of a man with acap and bells rushed before his mind's eye, and grew vivid and spokeand called itself "Aengus' messenger. " And I knew another man, a trulygreat seer, who saw a white fool in a visionary garden, where there wasa tree with peacocks' feathers instead of leaves, and flowers thatopened to show little human faces when the white fool had touched themwith his coxcomb, and he saw at another time a white fool sitting by apool and smiling and watching the images of many fair women floating upfrom the pool. 

What else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power andbeauty? and foolishness may be a kind of death. I cannot think itwonderful that many should see a fool with a shining vessel of someenchantment or wisdom or dream too powerful for mortal brains in "everyhousehold of them. " It is natural, too, that there should be a queen toevery household of them, and that one should hear little of theirkings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancientpeoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. Theself, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces byfoolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, andtherefore fools may get, and women do get of a certainty, glimpses ofmuch that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey. The man whosaw the white fool said of a certain woman, not a peasant woman, "If Ihad her power of vision I would know all the wisdom of the gods, andher visions do not interest her. " And I know of another woman, also nota peasant woman, who would pass in sleep into countries of an unearthlybeauty, and who never cared for anything but to be busy about her houseand her children; and presently an herb doctor cured her, as he calledit. Wisdom and beauty and power may sometimes, as I think, come tothose who die every day they live, though their dying may not be likethe dying Shakespeare spoke of. There is a war between the living andthe dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it. They will have itthat when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of theearth decay, they ripen in faery, and that our dreams lose their wisdomwhen the sap rises in the trees, and that our dreams can make the treeswither, and that one hears the bleating of the lambs of faery inNovember, and that blind eyes can see more than other eyes. Because thesoul always believes in these, or in like things, the cell and thewilderness shall never be long empty, or lovers come into the world whowill not understand the verse--

 Heardst thou not sweet words among That heaven-resounding minstrelsy? Heardst thou not that those who die Awake in a world of ecstasy? How love, when limbs are interwoven, And sleep, when the night of life is cloven, And thought to the world's dim boundaries clinging, And music when one's beloved is singing, Is death?

1901. 

THE FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE OF FAERY

Those that see the people of faery most often, and so have the most oftheir wisdom, are often very poor, but often, too, they are thought tohave a strength beyond that of man, as though one came, when one haspassed the threshold of trance, to those sweet waters where Maeldun sawthe dishevelled eagles bathe and become young again. 

There was an old Martin Roland, who lived near a bog a little out ofGort, who saw them often from his young days, and always towards theend of his life, though I would hardly call him their friend. He toldme a few months before his death that "they" would not let him sleep atnight with crying things at him in Irish, and with playing their pipes. He had asked a friend of his what he should do, and the friend had toldhim to buy a flute, and play on it when they began to shout or to playon their pipes, and maybe they would give up annoying him; and he did, and they always went out into the field when he began to play. Heshowed me the pipe, and blew through it, and made a noise, but he didnot know how to play; and then he showed me where he had pulled hischimney down, because one of them used to sit up on it and play on thepipes. A friend of his and mine went to see him a little time ago, forshe heard that "three of them" had told him he was to die. He said theyhad gone away after warning him, and that the children (children theyhad "taken, " I suppose) who used to come with them, and play about thehouse with them, had "gone to some other place, " because "they foundthe house too cold for them, maybe"; and he died a week after he hadsaid these things. 

His neighbours were not certain that he really saw anything in his oldage, but they were all certain that he saw things when he was a youngman. His brother said, "Old he is, and it's all in his brain the thingshe sees. If he was a young man we might believe in him. " But he wasimprovident, and never got on with his brothers. A neighbour said, "Thepoor man, they say they are mostly in his head now, but sure he was afine fresh man twenty years ago the night he saw them linked in twolots, like young slips of girls walking together. It was the night theytook away Fallon's little girl. " And she told how Fallon's little girlhad met a woman "with red hair that was as bright as silver, " who tookher away. Another neighbour, who was herself "clouted over the ear" byone of them for going into a fort where they were, said, "I believeit's mostly in his head they are; and when he stood in the door lastnight I said, 'The wind does be always in my ears, and the sound of itnever stops, ' to make him think it was the same with him; but he says, 'I hear them singing and making music all the time, and one of them isafter bringing out a little flute, and it's on it he's playing tothem. ' And this I know, that when he pulled down the chimney where hesaid the piper used to be sitting and playing, he lifted up stones, andhe an old man, that I could not have lifted when I was young andstrong. "

A friend has sent me from Ulster an account of one who was on terms oftrue friendship with the people of faery. It has been taken downaccurately, for my friend, who had heard the old woman's story sometime before I heard of it, got her to tell it over again, and wrote itout at once. She began by telling the old woman that she did not likebeing in the house alone because of the ghosts and fairies; and the oldwoman said, "There's nothing to be frightened about in faeries, miss. Many's the time I talked to a woman myself that was a faery, orsomething of the sort, and no less and more than mortal anyhow. Sheused to come about your grandfather's house--your mother's grandfather, that is--in my young days. But you'll have heard all about her. " Myfriend said that she had heard about her, but a long time before, andshe wanted to hear about her again; and the old woman went on, "Welldear, the very first time ever I heard word of her coming about waswhen your uncle--that is, your mother's uncle--Joseph married, andbuilding a house for his wife, for he brought her first to hisfather's, up at the house by the Lough. My father and us were livingnigh hand to where the new house was to be built, to overlook the menat their work. My father was a weaver, and brought his looms and allthere into a cottage that was close by. The foundations were markedout, and the building stones lying about, but the masons had not comeyet; and one day I was standing with my mother foment the house, whenwe sees a smart wee woman coming up the field over the burn to us. Iwas a bit of a girl at the time, playing about and sporting myself, butI mind her as well as if I saw her there now!" My friend asked how thewoman was dressed, and the old woman said, "It was a gray cloak she hadon, with a green cashmere skirt and a black silk handkercher tied roundher head, like the country women did use to wear in them times. " Myfriend asked, "How wee was she?" And the old woman said, "Well now, shewasn't wee at all when I think of it, for all we called her the WeeWoman. She was bigger than many a one, and yet not tall as you wouldsay. She was like a woman about thirty, brown-haired and round in theface. She was like Miss Betty, your grandmother's sister, and Betty waslike none of the rest, not like your grandmother, nor any of them. Shewas round and fresh in the face, and she never was married, and shenever would take any man; and we used to say that the Wee Woman--herbeing like Betty--was, maybe, one of their own people that had beentook off before she grew to her full height, and for that she wasalways following us and warning and foretelling. This time she walksstraight over to where my mother was standing. 'Go over to the Loughthis minute!'--ordering her like that--'Go over to the Lough, and tellJoseph that he must change the foundation of this house to where I'llshow you fornent the thornbush. That is where it is to be built, if heis to have luck and prosperity, so do what I'm telling ye this minute. 'The house was being built on 'the path' I suppose--the path used by thepeople of faery in their journeys, and my mother brings Joseph down andshows him, and he changes the foundations, the way he was bid, butdidn't bring it exactly to where was pointed, and the end of that was, when he come to the house, his own wife lost her life with an accidentthat come to a horse that hadn't room to turn right with a harrowbetween the bush and the wall. The Wee Woman was queer and angry whennext she come, and says to us, 'He didn't do as I bid him, but he'llsee what he'll see. "' My friend asked where the woman came from thistime, and if she was dressed as before, and the woman said, "Always thesame way, up the field beyant the burn. It was a thin sort of shawl shehad about her in summer, and a cloak about her in winter; and many andmany a time she came, and always it was good advice she was giving tomy mother, and warning her what not to do if she would have good luck. There was none of the other children of us ever seen her unless me; butI used to be glad when I seen her coming up the bum, and would run outand catch her by the hand and the cloak, and call to my mother, 'Here'sthe Wee Woman!' No man body ever seen her. My father used to be wantingto, and was angry with my mother and me, thinking we were telling liesand talking foolish like. And so one day when she had come, and wassitting by the fireside talking to my mother, I slips out to the fieldwhere he was digging. 'Come up, ' says I, 'if ye want to see her. She'ssitting at the fireside now, talking to mother. ' So in he comes with meand looks round angry like and sees nothing, and he up with a broomthat was near hand and hits me a crig with it. 'Take that now!' sayshe, 'for making a fool of me!' and away with him as fast as he could, and queer and angry with me. The Wee Woman says to me then, 'Ye gotthat now for bringing people to see me. No man body ever seen me, andnone ever will. '

"There was one day, though, she gave him a queer fright anyway, whether he had seen her or not. He was in among the cattle when ithappened, and he comes up to the house all trembling like. 'Don't letme hear you say another word of your Wee Woman. I have got enough ofher this time. ' Another time, all the same, he was up Gortin to sellhorses, and before he went off, in steps the Wee Woman and says she tomy mother, holding out a sort of a weed, 'Your man is gone up byGortin, and there's a bad fright waiting him coming home, but take thisand sew it in his coat, and he'll get no harm by it. ' My mother takesthe herb, but thinks to herself, 'Sure there's nothing in it, ' andthrows it on the floor, and lo and behold, and sure enough! coming homefrom Gortin, my father got as bad a fright as ever he got in his life. What it was I don't right mind, but anyway he was badly damaged by it. My mother was in a queer way, frightened of the Wee Woman, after whatshe done, and sure enough the next time she was angry. 'Ye didn'tbelieve me, ' she said, 'and ye threw the herb I gave ye in the fire, and I went far enough for it. ' There was another time she came and toldhow William Hearne was dead in America. 'Go over, ' she says, 'to theLough, and say that William is dead, and he died happy, and this wasthe last Bible chapter ever he read, ' and with that she gave the verseand chapter. 'Go, ' she says, 'and tell them to read them at the nextclass meeting, and that I held his head while he died. ' And sure enoughword came after that how William had died on the day she named. And, doing as she did about the chapter and hymn, they never had such aprayer-meeting as that. One day she and me and my mother was standingtalking, and she was warning her about something, when she says of asudden, 'Here comes Miss Letty in all her finery, and it's time for meto be off. ' And with that she gave a swirl round on her feet, andraises up in the air, and round and round she goes, and up and up, asif it was a winding stairs she went up, only far swifter. She went upand up, till she was no bigger than a bird up against the clouds, singing and singing the whole time the loveliest music I ever heard inmy life from that day to this. It wasn't a hymn she was singing, butpoetry, lovely poetry, and me and my mother stands gaping up, and allof a tremble. 'What is she at all, mother?' says I. 'Is it an angel sheis, or a faery woman, or what?' With that up come Miss Letty, that wasyour grandmother, dear, but Miss Letty she was then, and no word of herbeing anything else, and she wondered to see us gaping up that way, till me and my mother told her of it. She went on gay-dressed then, andwas lovely looking. She was up the lane where none of us could see hercoming forward when the Wee Woman rose up in that queer way, saying, 'Here comes Miss Letty in all her finery. ' Who knows to what farcountry she went, or to see whom dying?

"It was never after dark she came, but daylight always, as far as Imind, but wanst, and that was on a Hallow Eve night. My mother was bythe fire, making ready the supper; she had a duck down and some apples. In slips the Wee Woman, 'I'm come to pass my Hallow Eve with you, ' saysshe. 'That's right, ' says my mother, and thinks to herself, 'I can giveher her supper nicely. ' Down she sits by the fire a while. 'Now I'lltell you where you'll bring my supper, ' says she. 'In the room beyondthere beside the loom--set a chair in and a plate. ' 'When ye'respending the night, mayn't ye as well sit by the table and eat with therest of us?' 'Do what you're bid, and set whatever you give me in theroom beyant. I'll eat there and nowhere else. ' So my mother sets her aplate of duck and some apples, whatever was going, in where she bid, and we got to our supper and she to hers; and when we rose I went in, and there, lo and behold ye, was her supper-plate a bit ate of eachportion, and she clean gone!"

1897. 

DREAMS THAT HAVE NO MORAL

The friend who heard about Maive and the hazel-stick went to theworkhouse another day. She found the old people cold and wretched, "like flies in winter, " she said; but they forgot the cold when theybegan to talk. A man had just left them who had played cards in a rathwith the people of faery, who had played "very fair"; and one old manhad seen an enchanted black pig one night, and there were two oldpeople my friend had heard quarrelling as to whether Raftery orCallanan was the better poet. One had said of Raftery, "He was a bigman, and his songs have gone through the whole world. I remember himwell. He had a voice like the wind"; but the other was certain "thatyou would stand in the snow to listen to Callanan. " Presently an oldman began to tell my friend a story, and all listened delightedly, bursting into laughter now and then. The story, which I am going totell just as it was told, was one of those old rambling morallesstales, which are the delight of the poor and the hard driven, whereverlife is left in its natural simplicity. They tell of a time whennothing had consequences, when even if you were killed, if only you hada good heart, somebody would bring you to life again with a touch of arod, and when if you were a prince and happened to look exactly likeyour brother, you might go to bed with his queen, and have only alittle quarrel afterwards. We too, if we were so weak and poor thateverything threatened us with misfortune, would remember, if foolishpeople left us alone, every old dream that has been strong enough tofling the weight of the world from its shoulders. 

There was a king one time who was very much put out because he had noson, and he went at last to consult his chief adviser. And the chiefadviser said, "It's easy enough managed if you do as I tell you. Letyou send some one, " says he, "to such a place to catch a fish. And whenthe fish is brought in, give it to the queen, your wife, to eat. "

So the king sent as he was told, and the fish was caught and broughtin, and he gave it to the cook, and bade her put it before the fire, but to be careful with it, and not to let any blob or blister rise onit. But it is impossible to cook a fish before the fire without theskin of it rising in some place or other, and so there came a blob onthe skin, and the cook put her finger on it to smooth it down, and thenshe put her finger into her mouth to cool it, and so she got a taste ofthe fish. And then it was sent up to the queen, and she ate it, andwhat was left of it was thrown out into the yard, and there was a marein the yard and a greyhound, and they ate the bits that were thrown out. 

And before a year was out, the queen had a young son, and the cook hada young son, and the mare had two foals, and the greyhound had two pups. 

And the two young sons were sent out for a while to some place to becared, and when they came back they adviser and said, "Tell me some waythat I can know were so much like one another no person could knowwhich was the queen's son and which was the cook's. And the queen wasvexed at that, and she went to the chief which is my own son, for Idon't like to be giving the same eating and drinking to the cook's sonas to my own. " "It is easy to know that, " said the chief adviser, "ifyou will do as I tell you. Go you outside, and stand at the door theywill be coming in by, and when they see you, your own son will bow hishead, but the cook's son will only laugh. "

So she did that, and when her own son bowed his head, her servants puta mark on him that she would know him again. And when they were allsitting at their dinner after that, she said to Jack, that was thecook's son, "It is time for you to go away out of this, for you are notmy son. " And her own son, that we will call Bill, said, "Do not sendhim away, are we not brothers?" But Jack said, "I would have been longago out of this house if I knew it was not my own father and motherowned it. " And for all Bill could say to him, he would not stop. Butbefore he went, they were by the well that was in the garden, and hesaid to Bill, "If harm ever happens to me, that water on the top of thewell will be blood, and the water below will be honey. "

Then he took one of the pups, and one of the two horses, that wasfoaled after the mare eating the fish, and the wind that was after himcould not catch him, and he caught the wind that was before him. And hewent on till he came to a weaver's house, and he asked him for alodging, and he gave it to him. And then he went on till he came to aking's house, and he sent in at the door to ask, "Did he want aservant?" "All I want, " said the king, "is a boy that will drive outthe cows to the field every morning, and bring them in at night to bemilked. " "I will do that for you, " said Jack; so the king engaged him. 

In the morning Jack was sent out with the four-and-twenty cows, andthe place he was told to drive them to had not a blade of grass in itfor them, but was full of stones. So Jack looked about for some placewhere there would be better grass, and after a while he saw a fieldwith good green grass in it, and it belonging to a giant. So he knockeddown a bit of the wall and drove them in, and he went up himself intoan apple-tree and began to eat the apples. Then the giant came into thefield. "Fee-faw-fum, " says he, "I smell the blood of an Irishman. I seeyou where you are, up in the tree, " he said; "you are too big for onemouthful, and too small for two mouthfuls, and I don't know what I'lldo with you if I don't grind you up and make snuff for my nose. " "Asyou are strong, be merciful, " says Jack up in the tree. "Come down outof that, you little dwarf, " said the giant, "or I'll tear you and thetree asunder. " So Jack came down. "Would you sooner be driving red-hotknives into one another's hearts, " said the giant, "or would you soonerbe fighting one another on red-hot flags?" "Fighting on red-hot flagsis what I'm used to at home, " said Jack, "and your dirty feet will besinking in them and my feet will be rising. " So then they began thefight. The ground that was hard they made soft, and the ground that wassoft they made hard, and they made spring wells come up through thegreen flags. They were like that all through the day, no one gettingthe upper hand of the other, and at last a little bird came and sat onthe bush and said to Jack, "If you don't make an end of him by sunset, he'll make an end of you. " Then Jack put out his strength, and hebrought the giant down on his knees. "Give me my life, " says the giant, "and I'll give you the three best gifts. " "What are those?" said Jack. "A sword that nothing can stand against, and a suit that when you putit on, you will see everybody, and nobody will see you, and a pair ofshoes that will make you ran faster than the wind blows. " "Where arethey to be found?" said Jack. "In that red door you see there in thehill. " So Jack went and got them out. "Where will I try the sword?"says he. "Try it on that ugly black stump of a tree, " says the giant. "I see nothing blacker or uglier than your own head, " says Jack. Andwith that he made one stroke, and cut off the giant's head that it wentinto the air, and he caught it on the sword as it was coming down, andmade two halves of it. "It is well for you I did not join the bodyagain, " said the head, "or you would have never been able to strike itoff again. " "I did not give you the chance of that, " said Jack. And hebrought away the great suit with him. 

So he brought the cows home at evening, and every one wondered at allthe milk they gave that night. And when the king was sitting at dinnerwith the princess, his daughter, and the rest, he said, "I think I onlyhear two roars from beyond to-night in place of three. "

The next morning Jack went out again with the cows, and he saw anotherfield full of grass, and he knocked down the wall and let the cows in. All happened the same as the day before, but the giant that came thistime had two heads, and they fought together, and the little bird cameand spoke to Jack as before. And when Jack had brought the giant down, he said, "Give me my life, and I'll give you the best thing I have. ""What is that?" says Jack. "It's a suit that you can put on, and youwill see every one but no one can see you. " "Where is it?" said Jack. "It's inside that little red door at the side of the hill. " So Jackwent and brought out the suit. And then he cut off the giant's twoheads, and caught them coming down and made four halves of them. Andthey said it was well for him he had not given them time to join thebody. 

That night when the cows came home they gave so much milk that all thevessels that could be found were filled up. 

The next morning Jack went out again, and all happened as before, andthe giant this time had four heads, and Jack made eight halves of them. And the giant had told him to go to a little blue door in the side ofthe hill, and there he got a pair of shoes that when you put them onwould go faster than the wind. 

That night the cows gave so much milk that there were not vesselsenough to hold it, and it was given to tenants and to poor peoplepassing the road, and the rest was thrown out at the windows. I waspassing that way myself, and I got a drink of it. 

That night the king said to Jack, "Why is it the cows are giving somuch milk these days? Are you bringing them to any other grass?" "I amnot, " said Jack, "but I have a good stick, and whenever they would stopstill or lie down, I give them blows of it, that they jump and leapover walls and stones and ditches; that's the way to make cows giveplenty of milk. "

And that night at the dinner, the king said, "I hear no roars at all. "

The next morning, the king and the princess were watching at thewindow to see what would Jack do when he got to the field. And Jackknew they were there, and he got a stick, and began to batter the cows, that they went leaping and jumping over stones, and walls, and ditches. "There is no lie in what Jack said, " said the king then. 

Now there was a great serpent at that time used to come every sevenyears, and he had to get a kines daughter to eat, unless she would havesome good man to fight for her. And it was the princess at the placeJack was had to be given to it that time, and the king had been feedinga bully underground for seven years, and you may believe he got thebest of everything, to be ready to fight it. 

And when the time came, the princess went out, and the bully with herdown to the shore, and when they got there what did he do, but to tiethe princess to a tree, the way the serpent would be able to swallowher easy with no delay, and he himself went and hid up in an ivy-tree. And Jack knew what was going on, for the princess had told him aboutit, and had asked would he help her, but he said he would not. But hecame out now, and he put on the suit he had taken from the first giant, and he came by the place the princess was, but she didn't know him. "Isthat right for a princess to be tied to a tree?" said Jack. "It is not, indeed, " said she, and she told him what had happened, and how theserpent was coming to take her. "If you will let me sleep for awhilewith my head in your lap, " said Jack, "you could wake me when it iscoming. " So he did that, and she awakened him when she saw the serpentcoming, and Jack got up and fought with it, and drove it back into thesea. And then he cut the rope that fastened her, and he went away. Thebully came down then out of the tree, and he brought the princess towhere the king was, and he said, "I got a friend of mine to come andfight the serpent to-day, where I was a little timorous after being solong shut up underground, but I'll do the fighting myself to-morrow. "

The next day they went out again, and the same thing happened, thebully tied up the princess where the serpent could come at her fair andeasy, and went up himself to hide in the ivy-tree. Then Jack put on thesuit he had taken from the second giant, and he walked out, and theprincess did not know him, but she told him all that had happenedyesterday, and how some young gentleman she did not know had come andsaved her. So Jack asked might he lie down and take a sleep with hishead in her lap, the way she could awake him. And an happened the sameway as the day before. And the bully gave her up to the king, and saidhe had brought another of his friends to fight for her that day. 

The next day she was brought down to the shore as before, and a greatmany people gathered to see the serpent that was coming to bring theking's daughter away. And Jack brought out the suit of clothes he hadbrought away from the third giant, and she did not know him, and theytalked as before. But when he was asleep this time, she thought shewould make sure of being able to find him again, and she took out herscissors and cut off a piece of his hair, and made a little packet ofit and put it away. And she did another thing, she took off one of theshoes that was on his feet. 

And when she saw the serpent coming she woke him, and he said, "Thistime I will put the serpent in a way that he will eat no more king'sdaughters. " So he took out the sword he had got from the giant, and heput it in at the back of the serpent's neck, the way blood and watercame spouting out that went for fifty miles inland, and made an end ofhim. And then he made off, and no one saw what way he went, and thebully brought the princess to the king, and claimed to have saved her, and it is he who was made much of, and was the right-hand man afterthat. 

But when the feast was made ready for the wedding, the princess tookout the bit of hair she had, and she said she would marry no one butthe man whose hair would match that, and she showed the shoe and saidthat she would marry no one whose foot would not fit that shoe as well. And the bully tried to put on the shoe, but so much as his toe wouldnot go into it, and as to his hair, it didn't match at all to the bitof hair she had cut from the man that saved her. 

So then the king gave a great ball, to bring all the chief men of thecountry together to try would the shoe fit any of them. And they wereall going to carpenters and joiners getting bits of their feet cut offto try could they wear the shoe, but it was no use, not one of themcould get it on. 

Then the king went to his chief adviser and asked what could he do. And the chief adviser bade him to give another ball, and this time hesaid, "Give it to poor as well as rich. "

So the ball was given, and many came flocking to it, but the shoewould not fit any one of them. And the chief adviser said, "Is everyone here that belongs to the house?" "They are all here, " said theking, "except the boy that minds the cows, and I would not like him tobe coming up here. "

Jack was below in the yard at the time, and he heard what the kingsaid, and he was very angry, and he went and got his sword and camerunning up the stairs to strike off the king's head, but the man thatkept the gate met him on the stairs before he could get to the king, and quieted him down, and when he got to the top of the stairs and theprincess saw him, she gave a cry and ran into his arms. And they triedthe shoe and it fitted him, and his hair matched to the piece that hadbeen cut off. So then they were married, and a great feast was givenfor three days and three nights. 

And at the end of that time, one morning there came a deer outside thewindow, with bells on it, and they ringing. And it called out, "Here isthe hunt, where is the huntsman and the hound?" So when Jack heard thathe got up and took his horse and his hound and went hunting the deer. When it was in the hollow he was on the hill, and when it was on thehill he was in the hollow, and that went on all through the day, andwhen night fell it went into a wood. And Jack went into the wood afterit, and all he could see was a mud-wall cabin, and he went in, andthere he saw an old woman, about two hundred years old, and she sittingover the fire. "Did you see a deer pass this way?" says Jack. "I didnot, " says she, "but it's too late now for you to be following a deer, let you stop the night here. " "What will I do with my horse and myhound?" said Jack. "Here are two ribs of hair, " says she, "and let youtie them up with them. " So Jack went out and tied up the horse and thehound, and when he came in again the old woman said, "You killed mythree sons, and I'm going to kill you now, " and she put on a pair ofboxing-gloves, each one of them nine stone weight, and the nails inthem fifteen inches long. Then they began to fight, and Jack wasgetting the worst of it. "Help, hound!" he cried out, then "Squeezehair, " cried out the old woman, and the rib of hair that was about thehound's neck squeezed him to death. "Help, horse!" Jack called out, then, "Squeeze hair, " called out the old woman, and the rib of hairthat was about the horse's neck began to tighten and squeeze him todeath. Then the old woman made an end of Jack and threw him outside thedoor. 

To go back now to Bill. He was out in the garden one day, and he tooka look at the well, and what did he see but the water at the top wasblood, and what was underneath was honey. So he went into the houseagain, and he said to his mother, "I will never eat a second meal atthe same table, or sleep a second night in the same bed, till I knowwhat is happening to Jack. "

So he took the other horse and hound then, and set off, over the hillswhere cock never crows and horn never sounds, and the devil never blowshis bugle. And at last he came to the weaver's house, and when he wentin, the weaver says, "You are welcome, and I can give you bettertreatment than I did the last time you came in to me, " for she thoughtit was Jack who was there, they were so much like one another. "That isgood, " said Bill to himself, "my brother has been here. " And he gavethe weaver the full of a basin of gold in the morning before he left. 

Then he went on till he came to the king's house, and when he was atthe door the princess came running down the stairs, and said, "Welcometo you back again. " And all the people said, "It is a wonder you havegone hunting three days after your marriage, and to stop so long away. "So he stopped that night with the princess, and she thought it was herown husband all the time. 

And in the morning the deer came, and bells ringing on her, under thewindows, and called out, "The hunt is here, where are the huntsmen andthe hounds?" Then Bill got up and got his horse and his hound, andfollowed her over hills and hollows till they came to the wood, andthere he saw nothing but the mud-wall cabin and the old woman sittingby the fire, and she bade him stop the night there, and gave him tworibs of hair to tie his horse and his hound with. But Bill was wittierthan Jack was, and before he went out, he threw the ribs of hair intothe fire secretly. When he came in the old woman said, "Your brotherkilled my three sons, and I killed him, and I'll kill you along withhim. " And she put her gloves on, and they began the fight, and thenBill called out, "Help, horse. " "Squeeze hair, " called the old woman;"I can't squeeze, I'm in the fire, " said the hair. And the horse camein and gave her a blow of his hoof. "Help, hound, " said Bill then. "Squeeze, hair, " said the old woman; "I can't, I'm in the fire, " saidthe second hair. Then the bound put his teeth in her, and Bill broughther down, and she cried for mercy. "Give me my life, " she said, "andI'll tell you where you'll get your brother again, and his hound andhorse. " "Where's that?" said Bill. "Do you see that rod over the fire?"said she; "take it down and go outside the door where you'll see threegreen stones, and strike them with the rod, for they are your brother, and his horse and hound, and they'll come to life again. " "I will, butI'll make a green stone of you first, " said Bill, and he cut off herhead with his sword. 

Then he went out and struck the stones, and sure enough there wereJack, and his horse and hound, alive and well. And they began strikingother stones around, and men came from them, that had been turned tostones, hundreds and thousands of them. 

Then they set out for home, but on the way they had some dispute orsome argument together, for Jack was not well pleased to hear he hadspent the night with his wife, and Bill got angry, and he struck Jackwith the rod, and turned him to a green stone. And he went home, butthe princess saw he had something on his mind, and he said then, "Ihave killed my brother. " And he went back then and brought him to life, and they lived happy ever after, and they had children by thebasketful, and threw them out by the shovelful. I was passing one timemyself, and they called me in and gave me a cup of tea. 

1902. 

BY THE ROADSIDE

Last night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to listen tosome Irish songs. While I waited for the singers an old man sang aboutthat country beauty who died so many years ago, and spoke of a singerhe had known who sang so beautifully that no horse would pass him, butmust turn its head and cock its ears to listen. Presently a score ofmen and boys and girls, with shawls over their beads, gathered underthe trees to listen. Somebody sang Sa Muirnin Diles, and then somebodyelse Jimmy Mo Milestor, mournful songs of separation, of death, and ofexile. Then some of the men stood up and began to dance, while anotherlilted the measure they danced to, and then somebody sang Eiblin aRuin, that glad song of meeting which has always moved me more thanother songs, because the lover who made it sang it to his sweetheartunder the shadow of a mountain I looked at every day through mychildhood. The voices melted into the twilight and were mixed into thetrees, and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and weremixed with the generations of men. Now it was a phrase, now it was anattitude of mind, an emotional form, that had carried my memory toolder verses, or even to forgotten mythologies. I was carried so farthat it was as though I came to one of the four rivers, and followed itunder the wall of Paradise to the roots of the trees of knowledge andof life. There is no song or story handed down among the cottages thathas not words and thoughts to carry one as far, for though one can knowbut a little of their ascent, one knows that they ascend like medievalgenealogies through unbroken dignities to the beginning of the world. Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, andbecause it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever andpretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it hasgathered into itself the simplest and most unforgetable thoughts of thegenerations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted. Wherever itis spoken by the fireside, or sung by the roadside, or carved upon thelintel, appreciation of the arts that a single mind gives unity anddesign to, spreads quickly when its hour is come. 

In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a fewpeople--three or four thousand out of millions--favoured by their owncharacters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet "the imagination isthe man himself. " The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts intotheir service because men understood that when imagination isimpoverished, a principal voice--some would say the only voice--for theawakening of wise hope and durable faith, and understanding charity, can speak but in broken words, if it does not fall silent. And so ithas always seemed to me that we, who would re-awaken imaginativetradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering old storiesinto books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Those who are Irishand would spread foreign ways, which, for all but a few, are ways ofspiritual poverty, take part also. Their part is with those who were ofJewry, and yet cried out, "If thou let this man go thou art notCaesar's friend. "

1901. 

INTO THE TWILIGHT

 Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight; Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn. Thy mother Eire is always young, Dew ever shining and twilight gray, Though hope fall from thee or love decay Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue. Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill, For there the mystical brotherhood Of hollow wood and the hilly wood And the changing moon work out their will. And God stands winding his lonely horn; And Time and World are ever in flight, And love is less kind than the gray twilight, And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.