Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[I] who
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to 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 Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo.
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to 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 Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo.
Yeats
And I followed her
and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to
this, never again. ' He used the word clean as we would use words like
fresh or comely.
Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods. A labourer told
us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is
called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the wood. He
said, 'One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he
went away through the path in Shanwalla, an' bid me good-night. And
two hours after, there he was back again in the yard, an' bid me light
a candle that was in the stable. An' he told me that when he got into
Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head
as 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 it
vanished and left him. '
A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain
deep pool in the river. She said, 'I came over the stile from the
chapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came and
two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splash
of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me
saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bank
where 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 went
to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of
hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side
is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with
him, 'I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will
stay on it,' meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not
be able to go through it. So he took up 'a pebble of cow-dung, and as
soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music
that ever was heard. ' They ran away, and when they had gone about
two hundred 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 arguments more complicated than even those
paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at
other times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion
about a nymph of the Ilissus, 'The common opinion is enough for me. ' I
believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom
we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some
wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever
seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant
and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood
without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or
something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And
now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with
almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me.
You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever
your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the
Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty
believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers
imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but
some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a
gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long
be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and
fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport
than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among
green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of
argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we
who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple
of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even
spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as
I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our
natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall
unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among
blue 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 good
spirits.
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 hides what
neither net nor line can take. These creatures are of the race of the
white stag that flits in and out of the tales of Arthur, and of the
evil 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 that
fly and of them that follow among the thickets that are about the Gates
of Death. A man I know remembers that his father was one night in the
wood of Inchy, 'where the lads of Gort used to be stealing rods. He was
sitting by the wall, and the dog beside him, and he heard something
come running from Owbawn Weir, and he could see nothing, but the sound
of its feet on the ground was like the sound of the feet of a deer. And
when it passed him, the dog got between him and the wall and scratched
at it there as if it was afraid, but still he could see nothing but
only hear the sound of hoofs. So when it was passed he turned and came
away home. ' 'Another time,' the man says, 'my father told me he was
in a boat out on the lake with two or three men from Gort, and one of
them had an eel-spear, and he thrust it into the water, and it hit
something, and the man fainted and they had to carry him out of the
boat to land, and when he came to himself he said that what he struck
was like a calf, but whatever it was, it was not fish! ' A friend of
mine is convinced that these terrible creatures, so common in lakes,
were set there in old times by subtle enchanters to watch over the
gates of wisdom. He thinks that if we sent our spirits down into the
water we would make them of one substance with strange moods of ecstasy
and power, and go out it may be to the conquest of the world. We would,
however, he believes, have first to outface and perhaps overthrow
strange images full of a more powerful life than if they were really
alive. It may be that we shall look at them without fear when we have
endured the last adventure, that is death.
1902.
ARISTOTLE OF THE BOOKS
THE friend who can get the woodcutter to talk more readily than he will
to anybody else went lately to see his old wife. She lives in a cottage
not far from the edge of the woods, and is as full of old talk as her
husband. This time she began to talk of Goban, the legendary mason, and
his wisdom, but said presently, 'Aristotle of the Books, too, was very
wise, and he had a great deal of experience, but did not the bees get
the better of him in the end? He wanted to know how they packed the
comb, and he wasted the better part of a fortnight watching them, and
he could not see them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover
on it and put it over them, and he thought to see. But when he went and
put his eyes to the glass they had it all covered with wax so that it
was as black as the pot; and he was as blind as before. He said he was
never rightly kilt till then. They had him that time surely! '
1902.
THE SWINE OF THE GODS
A FEW years ago a friend of mine told me of something that happened
to him when he was a young man and out drilling with some Connaught
Fenians. They were but a car-full, and drove along a hill-side until
they came to a quiet place. They left the car and went further up the
hill with their rifles, and drilled for a while. As they were coming
down 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 that
it was a fairy pig, and they all began to run to keep up the joke. The
pig ran too, and presently, how nobody knew, this mock terror became
real terror, and they ran as for their lives. When they got to the
car they made the horse gallop as fast as possible, but the pig still
followed. Then one of them put up his rifle to fire, but when he looked
along the barrel he could see nothing. Presently they turned a corner
and came to a village. They told the people of the village what had
happened, and the people of the village took pitchforks and spades and
the like, and went along the road with them to drive the pig away. When
they turned the corner they could not find anything.
1902.
A VOICE
ONE day I was walking over a bit of marshy ground close to Inchy Wood
when I felt, all of a sudden, and only for a second, an emotion which
I said to myself was the root of Christian mysticism. There had swept
over me a sense of weakness, of dependence on a great personal Being
somewhere far off yet near at hand. No thought of mine had prepared
me for this emotion, for I had been pre-occupied with AEngus and Edain
and with Mannanan, son of the sea. That night I awoke lying upon my
back and hearing a voice speaking above me and saying, 'No human soul
is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any
human soul 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 ever seen. A young man and a young girl dressed in olive-green
raiment, cut like old Greek raiment, were standing at my bedside.
I looked at the girl and noticed that her dress was gathered about
her neck into a kind of chain, or perhaps into some kind of stiff
embroidery which represented ivy-leaves. But what filled me with wonder
was the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now.
It was beautiful, as few faces are beautiful, but it had neither, one
would think, the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or
in speculation. It was peaceful like the faces of animals, or like
mountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad. I
thought for a moment that she might be the beloved of AEngus, but how
could that hunted, alluring, happy, immortal wretch have a face like
this? Doubtless she was from among the children of the Moon, but who
among them I shall never know.
1902.
KIDNAPPERS
A LITTLE north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of Ben
Bulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white
square in the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand;
no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more
inaccessible place upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to
the deep considering. It is the door of faery-land. In the middle of
night it swings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out. All night the
gay rabble sweep to and fro across the land, invisible to all, unless
perhaps where, in some more than commonly 'gentle' place--Drumcliff
or Drum-a-hair--the night-capped heads of faery-doctors may be thrust
from their doors to see what mischief the 'gentry' are doing. To their
trained eyes and ears the fields are covered by red-hatted riders, and
the air is full of shrill voices--a sound like whistling, as an ancient
Scottish seer has recorded, and wholly different from the talk of the
angels, who 'speak much in the throat, like the Irish,' as Lilly, the
astrologer, has wisely said. If there be a new-born baby or new-wed
bride in the neighbourhood, the night-capped 'doctors' will peer with
more than common care, for the unearthly troop do not always return
empty-handed. Sometimes a new-wed bride or a new-born baby goes with
them into their mountains; the door swings to behind, and the new-born
or the new-wed moves henceforth in the bloodless land of Faery; happy
enough, but doomed to melt out at the last judgment like bright vapour,
for the soul cannot live without sorrow. Through this door of white
stone, and the other doors of that land where _geabbeadh tu an sonas
aer pighin_ ('you can buy joy for a penny'), have gone kings, queens,
and princes, but so greatly has the power of Faery dwindled, that there
are none but peasants in these sad chronicles of mine.
Somewhere about the beginning of last century appeared at the western
corner of Market Street, Sligo, where the butcher's shop now is, not
a palace, as in Keats's _Lamia_, but an apothecary's shop, ruled over
by a certain unaccountable Dr. Opendon. Where he came from, none ever
knew. There also was in Sligo, in those days, a woman, Ormsby by name,
whose husband had fallen mysteriously sick. The doctors could make
nothing of him. Nothing seemed wrong with him, yet weaker and weaker he
grew. Away went the wife to Dr. Opendon. She was shown into the shop
parlour. A black cat was sitting straight up before the fire. She had
just time to see 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, and his wife walked behind him dressed in black likewise.
She gave him a guinea, and got a little bottle in return. Her husband
recovered that time. Meanwhile the black doctor cured many people; but
one day a rich patient 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 good-looking man, and his wife felt sure the 'gentry' were
coveting him. She went and called on the 'faery-doctor' at Cairnsfoot.
As soon as he had heard her tale, he went behind the back door and
began muttering, muttering, muttering--making spells. Her husband got
well this time also. But after a while he sickened again, the fatal
third time, and away went she once more to Cairnsfoot, and out went the
faery-doctor behind his back door and 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 after when she spoke of him Mrs. Ormsby shook
her head saying she knew well where he was, and it wasn't in heaven or
hell or purgatory either. She probably believed that a log of wood was
left behind in his place, but so 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 some
relations 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 woman
vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her
husband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he received
word in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured by
faeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longing
to see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to the
peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being
a dutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets of
Glasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She was
happy, 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 well
that she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faery
food, that she might keep him with her, refused, and came home to his
people 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, the
Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild
duck. 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 of
them 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
to find it was but faery glamour. To this hour on the border of the
lake is shown a half-dug trench--the signet of their impiety. A little
way from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of faery
kidnapping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, who
sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as
though 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 were
faeries, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band.
To him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when
she saw her old love, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest he
should eat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into
that bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards
with three of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until
he saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly
all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to
the house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the
keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic
poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my
white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.
Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the
living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John
Kirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[H] are a family much rumoured of
in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and a
spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read that the
mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe.
John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpool
with a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. That
evening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and asked
where 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 be
burnt to-night. ' He took his horse elsewhere, and sure enough the
stable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as reward to
ride as his jockey in the coming race, and then was gone. The race-time
came 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 in
my right hand bet all you are worth. ' 'For,' said Paddy Flynn, who told
me the tale, 'the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on making
the sign of the cross with it, and all that, come Christmas, and a
banshee, 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 John
Kirwan cleared the field out. When the race was over, 'What can I do
for you now? ' said he. 'Nothing but this,' said the boy: 'my mother
has a 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
ill follows them; but you will never see me more. ' With that he made
himself air, and vanished.
Sometimes animals are carried off--apparently drowned animals more than
others. In Claremorris, Galway, Paddy Flynn told me, lived a poor widow
with one cow and its calf. The cow fell into the river, and was washed
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 to take
the calf down to the edge of the river, and hide himself and watch.
He did as she had told him, and as evening came on the calf began
to low, and after a while the cow came along the edge of the river
and commenced suckling it. Then, as he had been told, he caught the
cow's tail. Away they went at a great pace, across hedges and ditches,
till they came to a royalty (a name for the little circular ditches,
commonly called raths or forts, that Ireland is covered with since
Pagan times). Therein he saw walking or sitting all the people who had
died out of his village in his time. A woman was sitting on the edge
with a child on her knees, and she called out to him to mind what the
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. That broke
the spell, and he was able to turn her homeward. 'Do not forget the
spancel,' said the woman with the child on her knees; 'take the inside
one. ' There were three spancels on a bush; he took one, and the cow was
driven safely home to the widow.
There is hardly a valley or mountain-side where folk cannot tell you of
some one pillaged from amongst them. Two or three miles from the Heart
Lake lives an old woman who was stolen away in her youth. After seven
years she was brought home again for some reason or other, but she had
no toes left. She had danced them off. Many near the white stone door
in Ben Bulben have been stolen away.
It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places
I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening by
the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint
mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily
discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures,
the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or
from the Heart Lake in the south.
FOOTNOTE:
[H] I have since heard that it was not the Kirwans, but their
predecessors at Castle Hacket, the Hackets themselves, I think, who
were descended from a man and a spirit, and were notable for beauty.
I imagine that the mother of Lord Cloncurry was descended from the
Hackets. It may well be that all through these stories the name of
Kirwan has taken the place of the older name. Legend mixes everything
together in her cauldron.
THE UNTIRING ONES
IT is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed
emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and
something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement
of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the
furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good 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 can the circles of
the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal peasants remember
this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of the heaviness of the
fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell 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 like a young woman, came
to a farmer's house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth and
setting all tidy. The next night they came again, and while the farmer
was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one room, and having
arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeur it seems, they
began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and days went by, and
all the country-side came to look at them, but still their feet 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, and went and told
them that the priest was coming. The little creatures when they heard
this went back to their own country, and there their joy shall last as
long as the points of the rushes are brown, the people 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 have
been men and women who, falling under their enchantment, have attained,
perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more than
faery abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have
gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty,
blown hither and thither by the winds that awakened the stars, the dim
kingdom has acknowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and
given them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in
the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat
by rocking her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and
said that the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the
dim kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old
and die while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would
be gifted with a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log
out of the fire and bury it in the garden, and her child would live
as long as it remained unconsumed. The mother buried the log, and the
child grew up, became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries,
who came to her at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince
died, and another prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful
peasant girl in his turn; and after another seven hundred years he died
also, and another prince and another husband came in his stead, and
so on until she had had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of
the parish called upon her, and told her that she was a scandal to the
whole neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was
very sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him
about the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and
then they burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and
everybody was pleased.
Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[I] who
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to 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 Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo.
The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log
and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled
hate 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.
FOOTNOTE:
[I] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would
mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a
very famous person, perhaps the mother of the gods herself. A friend
of mind found her, as he thinks, frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey
Lake on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or
the story-teller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many
Lough Leaths.
EARTH, FIRE AND WATER
SOME French writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desert
went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them
what they are. I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to
be even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be
that the elements have their children. If we knew the Fire Worshippers
better we might find that their centuries of pious observance have been
rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and
I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of
mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form
themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some
pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the Gods
everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that
communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories
of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our country people speak with
the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand
death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into
the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make
our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they
may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a
clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did
not the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of
water, and that 'even the generation of images in the mind is from
water'?
1902.
THE OLD TOWN
I FELL, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the power of
faery.
I had gone with a young man and his sister--friends and relations of my
own--to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were coming home
talking over what he had told us. It was dark, and our imaginations
were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may have brought
us, unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping and waking,
where Sphinxes and Chimaeras sit open-eyed and where there are always
murmurings and whisperings. I cannot think that what we saw was an
imagination of the waking mind. We had come under some trees that made
the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light moving slowly
across the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not see
anything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge of
the river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a
ruined church covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called
"the Old Town," which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell's
day. 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, mounting
up slowly towards the sky; then we saw other faint lights for a minute
or two, and at last a bright flame like the flame of a torch moving
rapidly over the river. We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems
all so unreal, that I have never written of it until now, and hardly
ever spoken of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasoning
impulse, I have avoided giving it weight in the argument. Perhaps
I have felt that my recollections of things seen when the sense of
reality was weakened must be untrustworthy. A few months ago, however,
I talked it over with my two friends, and compared their somewhat
meagre recollections with my own. That sense of unreality was all the
more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable
as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I
remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. The girl was
sitting reading under a large old-fashioned mirror, and I was reading
and writing a couple of yards away, when I heard a sound as if a shower
of peas had been thrown against the mirror, and while I was looking
at it I 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 the wainscoting beside my head. And after that for some days
came other sights and sounds, not to me but to the girl, her brother,
and the servants. Now it was a bright light, now it was letters of fire
that vanished before they could be read, now it was a heavy foot moving
about in the seemingly empty house. One wonders whether creatures who
live, the country people believe, wherever men and women have lived in
earlier times, followed us from the ruins of the old town? or did they
come from the banks of the river by the trees where the first light had
shone for a moment?
1902.
THE MAN AND HIS BOOTS
THERE was a doubter in Donegal, and he would not hear of ghosts or
sheogues, and there was a house in Donegal that had been haunted as
long as man could remember, and this is the story of how the house got
the better of the man. The man came into the house and lighted a fire
in the room under the haunted one, and took off his boots and set them
on the hearth, and stretched out his feet and warmed himself. For a
time he prospered in his unbelief; but a little while after the night
had fallen, and everything had got very dark, one of his boots began to
move. It got up off the floor and gave a kind of slow jump towards the
door, and then the other boot did the same, and after that the first
boot jumped again. And thereupon it struck the man that an invisible
being had got into his boots, and was now going away in them. When the
boots reached the door they went up-stairs slowly, and then the man
heard them go tramp, tramp round the haunted room over his head. A few
minutes passed, and he could hear them again upon the stairs, and after
that 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 along
towards him, and then one got up and hit him, and afterwards the other
hit him, and then again the first hit him, and so on, until they drove
him out of the room, and finally out of the house. In this way he was
kicked 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 of
the Sidhe, but the fantastic nature of the vengeance is like the work
of the Sidhe who live in the heart of phantasy.
A COWARD
ONE day I was at the house of my friend the strong farmer, who lives
beyond Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain, and met there a young lad who
seemed to be disliked by the two daughters. I asked why they disliked
him, and was told he was a coward. This interested me, for some whom
robust children of nature take to be cowards are but men and women with
a nervous system too finely made for their life and work. I looked at
the lad; but no, that pink-and-white face and strong body had nothing
of undue sensibility. After a little he told me his story. He had
lived a wild and reckless life, until one day, two years before, he
was coming home late at night, and suddenly felt himself sinking in,
as it were, upon the ghostly world. For a moment he saw the face of a
dead brother rise up before him, and then he turned and ran. He did not
stop till he came to a cottage nearly a mile down the road. He flung
himself against the door with so much of violence that he broke the
thick wooden bolt and fell upon the floor. From that day he gave up his
wild life, 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,
and he often went two miles round to avoid it; nor could, he said, 'the
prettiest girl in the country' persuade him to see her home after a
party if he were alone. He feared everything, for he had looked at the
face 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 dancing
there than upon the earth; and there is more treasure there than upon
the earth. In the beginning the earth was perhaps made to fulfil the
desire of man, but now it has got old and fallen into decay. What
wonder if we try and pilfer the treasures of that other kingdom!
A friend was once at a village near Sleive League. One day he was
straying about a rath called 'Cashel Nore. ' A man with a haggard face
and unkempt hair, and clothes falling in pieces, came into the rath and
began digging. My friend turned to a peasant who was working near and
asked who the man was. 'That is the third O'Byrne,' was the answer. A
few days after he learned this story: A great quantity of treasure had
been buried in the rath in pagan times, and a number of evil faeries
set to guard it; but some day it was to be found and belong to the
family of the O'Byrnes. Before that day three O'Byrnes must find it and
die. Two had already done so. The first had dug and dug until at last
he got a glimpse of the stone coffer that contained it, but immediately
a thing like a huge hairy dog came down the mountain and tore him to
pieces. The next morning the treasure had again vanished deep into
the earth. The second O'Byrne came and dug and dug until he found the
coffer, and lifted the lid and saw the gold shining within. He saw some
horrible sight the next moment, and went raving mad and soon died. The
treasure again sank out of sight. The third O'Byrne is now digging. He
believes that he will die in some terrible way the moment he finds the
treasure, but that the spell will be broken, and the O'Byrne family
made rich for ever, as they were of old.
A peasant of the neighbourhood once saw the treasure. He found the
shin-bone of a hare lying on the grass. He took it up; there was a hole
in it; he looked through the hole, and saw the gold heaped up under the
ground. He hurried home to bring a spade, but when he got to the rath
again 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,
time after time, and have gathered thus many a crumb of faery lore.
Drumcliff is a wide green valley, lying at the foot of Ben Bulben, the
mountain in whose side the square white door swings open at nightfall
to loose the faery riders on the world. The great Saint Columba
himself, the builder of many of the old ruins in the valley, climbed
the mountains 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 table-cloth, and lying in the foam midway between the
round cairn-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 and
rocks and grass: a mournful, haunted place. No wise peasant would fall
asleep under its low cliff, for he who sleeps here may wake 'silly,'
the 'good people' having carried off his soul. There is no more ready
short-cut to the dim kingdom than this plovery headland, for, covered
and smothered now from sight by mounds of sand, a long cave goes
thither 'full of gold and silver, and the most beautiful parlours and
drawing-rooms. ' Once, before the sand covered it, a dog strayed in, and
was heard yelping helplessly deep underground in a fort far inland.
These forts or raths, made before modern history had begun, cover all
Rosses and all Columkille. The one where the dog yelped has, like most
others, an underground beehive chamber in the midst. Once when I was
poking about there, an unusually intelligent and 'reading' peasant who
had come with me, and waited outside, knelt down by the opening, and
whispered in a timid voice, 'Are you all right, sir? ' I had been some
little while underground, and he feared I had been carried off like the
dog.
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
northern slope lie a few stray cottages. One night a farmer's young son
came from one of them and saw the fort all flaming, and ran towards
it, but the '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 a horse, and that all night long he went on the most
wonderful ride through the country. In the morning he was still beating
his fence, and they carried him home, where he remained a simpleton for
three years before he came to himself again. A little later a farmer
tried to level the fort. His cows and horses died, and all manner of
trouble overtook him, and finally he himself was led home, and left
useless with 'his head on his knees by the fire to the day of his
death. '
A few hundred yards southwards of the northern angle of Rosses is
another angle having also its cave, though this one is not covered with
sand. About twenty years ago a brig was wrecked near by, and three
or four fishermen were put to watch the deserted hulk through the
darkness. At midnight they saw sitting on a stone at the cave's mouth
two red-capped fiddlers fiddling with all their might. The men fled. A
great 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 of
never-fading mystery. When the aged countrywoman stands at her door
in the evening, and, in her own words, 'looks at the mountains and
thinks of the goodness of God,' God is all the nearer, because the
pagan powers are not far: because northward in Ben Bulben, famous for
hawks, the white square door swings open at sundown, and those wild
unchristian riders rush forth upon the fields, while southward the
White Lady, who is doubtless Maive herself, wanders under the broad
cloud nightcap of Knocknarea. How may she doubt these things, even
though the priest shakes his head at her? Did not a herd-boy, no long
while since, see the White Lady? She passed so close that the skirt of
her dress touched him. 'He fell down, and was dead three days. ' But
this is merely the small gossip of faerydom--the little stitches that
join this world and the other.
One night as I sat eating Mrs. H----'s soda-bread, her husband told me a
longish story, much the best of all I heard in Rosses. Many a poor man
from Fin M'Cool to our own days has had some such adventure to tell
of, for those creatures, the 'good people,' love to repeat themselves.
At any rate the story-tellers do. 'In the times when we used to travel
by the canal,' he said, 'I was coming down from Dublin. When we came to
Mullingar the canal ended, and I began to walk, and stiff and fatigued
I was after the slowness. I had some friends with me, and now and then
we walked, now and then we rode in a cart. So on till we saw some girls
milking cows, and stopped to joke with them. After a while we asked
them for a drink of milk. "We have nothing to put it in here," they
said, "but come to the house with us. " We went home with them, and sat
round 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 to
eat. There was a pot on the fire, and they took the meat out and put it
on 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. It
grew darker and darker, and there I still sat, loath as ever to leave
the good fire, and after a while two men came in, carrying between them
a corpse. When I saw them coming I hid behind the door. Says one to the
other, putting the corpse on the spit, "Who'll turn the spit? " Says
the other, "Michael H----, come out of that and turn the meat. " I came
out 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 you on
the spit instead"; and on that they went out. I sat there trembling
and turning the corpse till towards midnight. The men came again, and
the one said it was burnt, and the other said it was done right. But
having fallen out over it, they both said they would do me no harm that
time; 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
me by the shoulder, and put me out like a shot. It was a wild blowing
night. Never in all my born days did I see such a night--the darkest
night that ever came out of the heavens. I did not know where I was for
the life of me. So when one of the men came after me and touched me on
the shoulder, with a "Michael H----, can you tell a story now? " "I can,"
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 sitting here, and you
two men brought in a corpse and put it on the spit, and set me turning
it. " "That will do," says he; "ye may go in there and lie down on the
bed. " And I went, nothing loath; and in the morning where was I but in
the middle of a green field! '
'Drumcliff' is a great place for omens. Before a prosperous fishing
season a herring-barrel appears in the midst of a storm-cloud; and at a
place called Columkille's Strand, a place of marsh and mire, an ancient
boat, with Saint Columba himself, comes floating in from sea on a
moonlight night: a portent of a brave harvesting. They have their dread
portents too. Some few seasons ago a fisherman saw, far on the horizon,
renowned Hy Brazel, where he who touches shall find no more labour or
care, nor cynic laughter, but shall go walking about under shadiest
boscage, and enjoy the conversation of Cuchulain and his heroes. A
vision 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
in armour, shadow-hares, fire-tongued hounds, whistling seals, and so
on. A whistling seal sank a ship the other day. At Drumcliff there
is a very ancient graveyard. _The Annals of the Four Masters_ have
this verse about a soldier named Denadhach, who died in 871: 'A pious
soldier of the race of Con lies under hazel crosses at Drumcliff. ' Not
very long ago 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 was going. It was the 'pious soldier of the race of Con,' says
local wisdom, still keeping watch, with his ancient piety, over the
graveyard. Again, the custom is still common hereabouts of sprinkling
the doorstep with the blood of a chicken on the death of a very young
child, thus (as belief is) drawing into the blood the evil spirits from
the too weak soul. Blood is a great gatherer of evil spirits. To cut
your 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 on the slope of Ben Bulben, or even on the plain round Knocknarea.
There is a history concerning the house and the bush. A man once lived
there who found on the quay of Sligo a package containing three hundred
pounds in notes. It was dropped by a foreign sea captain. This my man
knew, but said nothing. It was money for freight, and the sea captain,
not daring to face his owners, committed suicide in mid-ocean. Shortly
afterwards my man died. His soul could not rest. At any rate, strange
sounds were heard round his house, though that had grown and prospered
since the freight money. The wife was often seen by those still alive
out in the garden praying at the bush I have spoken of, for the shade
of 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 put
spade 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, a
snipe flew out of the solid plaster and away; the troubled ghost, say
the neighbours, of the note-finder was at last dislodged.
My forebears and relations have lived near Rosses and Drumcliff these
many years. A few miles northward I am wholly a stranger, and can find
nothing. When I ask for stories of the faeries, my answer is some such
as was given me by a woman who lives near a white stone fort--one of
the 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
is dangerous to talk of the creatures. Only friendship for yourself
or knowledge of your forebears will loosen these cautious tongues. My
friend, 'the sweet Harp-String' (I give no more than his Irish name
for fear 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
prescriptive right to hear tell of all kind of other-world creatures.
They are almost relations of his, if all people say concerning the
parentage of magicians be true.
THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE
I
ONCE a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the
cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made
them feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil
himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows
with a hammer. It got white where the blows fell but did not break,
and they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet,
and worthy of every honour. In Ireland we have much kinship with the
Icelanders, or 'Danes' as we call them and all other dwellers in the
Scandinavian countries. In some of our mountainous and barren places,
and in our seaboard villages, we still test each other in much the same
way the Icelanders tested the head of Egil. We may have acquired the
custom from those ancient Danish pirates, whose descendants the people
of Rosses tell me still remember every field and hillock in Ireland
which once belonged to their forebears, and are able to describe Rosses
itself as well as any native. There is one seaboard district known as
Roughley, where the men are never known to shave or trim their wild red
beards, and where there is a fight ever on foot. I have seen them at a
boat-race fall foul of each other, and after much loud Gaelic, strike
each other with oars. The first boat had gone aground, and by dint
of hitting out with the long oars kept the second boat from passing,
only to give the victory to the third. One day the Sligo people say a
man from Roughley was tried in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row,
and made the defence not unknown in Ireland, that some heads are so
thin you cannot be responsible for them. Having turned with a look of
passionate contempt towards the solicitor who was prosecuting, and
cried, 'That little fellow's skull if ye were to hit it would go like
an 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 desolate
places. I may have been thinking of Moughorow, a much wilder place, for
the 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 his
deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the
valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all
things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow
under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must
needs think and think. One July a couple of years ago I took my supper
with a Captain Moran on board the ss. _Margaret_, that had put into a
western river from I know not where.
and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to
this, never again. ' He used the word clean as we would use words like
fresh or comely.
Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods. A labourer told
us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is
called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the wood. He
said, 'One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he
went away through the path in Shanwalla, an' bid me good-night. And
two hours after, there he was back again in the yard, an' bid me light
a candle that was in the stable. An' he told me that when he got into
Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head
as 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 it
vanished and left him. '
A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain
deep pool in the river. She said, 'I came over the stile from the
chapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came and
two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splash
of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me
saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bank
where 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 went
to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of
hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side
is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with
him, 'I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will
stay on it,' meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not
be able to go through it. So he took up 'a pebble of cow-dung, and as
soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music
that ever was heard. ' They ran away, and when they had gone about
two hundred 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 arguments more complicated than even those
paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at
other times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion
about a nymph of the Ilissus, 'The common opinion is enough for me. ' I
believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom
we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some
wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever
seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant
and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood
without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or
something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And
now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with
almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me.
You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever
your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the
Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty
believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers
imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but
some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a
gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long
be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and
fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport
than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among
green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of
argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we
who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple
of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even
spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as
I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our
natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall
unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among
blue 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 good
spirits.
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 hides what
neither net nor line can take. These creatures are of the race of the
white stag that flits in and out of the tales of Arthur, and of the
evil 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 that
fly and of them that follow among the thickets that are about the Gates
of Death. A man I know remembers that his father was one night in the
wood of Inchy, 'where the lads of Gort used to be stealing rods. He was
sitting by the wall, and the dog beside him, and he heard something
come running from Owbawn Weir, and he could see nothing, but the sound
of its feet on the ground was like the sound of the feet of a deer. And
when it passed him, the dog got between him and the wall and scratched
at it there as if it was afraid, but still he could see nothing but
only hear the sound of hoofs. So when it was passed he turned and came
away home. ' 'Another time,' the man says, 'my father told me he was
in a boat out on the lake with two or three men from Gort, and one of
them had an eel-spear, and he thrust it into the water, and it hit
something, and the man fainted and they had to carry him out of the
boat to land, and when he came to himself he said that what he struck
was like a calf, but whatever it was, it was not fish! ' A friend of
mine is convinced that these terrible creatures, so common in lakes,
were set there in old times by subtle enchanters to watch over the
gates of wisdom. He thinks that if we sent our spirits down into the
water we would make them of one substance with strange moods of ecstasy
and power, and go out it may be to the conquest of the world. We would,
however, he believes, have first to outface and perhaps overthrow
strange images full of a more powerful life than if they were really
alive. It may be that we shall look at them without fear when we have
endured the last adventure, that is death.
1902.
ARISTOTLE OF THE BOOKS
THE friend who can get the woodcutter to talk more readily than he will
to anybody else went lately to see his old wife. She lives in a cottage
not far from the edge of the woods, and is as full of old talk as her
husband. This time she began to talk of Goban, the legendary mason, and
his wisdom, but said presently, 'Aristotle of the Books, too, was very
wise, and he had a great deal of experience, but did not the bees get
the better of him in the end? He wanted to know how they packed the
comb, and he wasted the better part of a fortnight watching them, and
he could not see them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover
on it and put it over them, and he thought to see. But when he went and
put his eyes to the glass they had it all covered with wax so that it
was as black as the pot; and he was as blind as before. He said he was
never rightly kilt till then. They had him that time surely! '
1902.
THE SWINE OF THE GODS
A FEW years ago a friend of mine told me of something that happened
to him when he was a young man and out drilling with some Connaught
Fenians. They were but a car-full, and drove along a hill-side until
they came to a quiet place. They left the car and went further up the
hill with their rifles, and drilled for a while. As they were coming
down 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 that
it was a fairy pig, and they all began to run to keep up the joke. The
pig ran too, and presently, how nobody knew, this mock terror became
real terror, and they ran as for their lives. When they got to the
car they made the horse gallop as fast as possible, but the pig still
followed. Then one of them put up his rifle to fire, but when he looked
along the barrel he could see nothing. Presently they turned a corner
and came to a village. They told the people of the village what had
happened, and the people of the village took pitchforks and spades and
the like, and went along the road with them to drive the pig away. When
they turned the corner they could not find anything.
1902.
A VOICE
ONE day I was walking over a bit of marshy ground close to Inchy Wood
when I felt, all of a sudden, and only for a second, an emotion which
I said to myself was the root of Christian mysticism. There had swept
over me a sense of weakness, of dependence on a great personal Being
somewhere far off yet near at hand. No thought of mine had prepared
me for this emotion, for I had been pre-occupied with AEngus and Edain
and with Mannanan, son of the sea. That night I awoke lying upon my
back and hearing a voice speaking above me and saying, 'No human soul
is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any
human soul 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 ever seen. A young man and a young girl dressed in olive-green
raiment, cut like old Greek raiment, were standing at my bedside.
I looked at the girl and noticed that her dress was gathered about
her neck into a kind of chain, or perhaps into some kind of stiff
embroidery which represented ivy-leaves. But what filled me with wonder
was the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now.
It was beautiful, as few faces are beautiful, but it had neither, one
would think, the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or
in speculation. It was peaceful like the faces of animals, or like
mountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad. I
thought for a moment that she might be the beloved of AEngus, but how
could that hunted, alluring, happy, immortal wretch have a face like
this? Doubtless she was from among the children of the Moon, but who
among them I shall never know.
1902.
KIDNAPPERS
A LITTLE north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of Ben
Bulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white
square in the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand;
no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more
inaccessible place upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to
the deep considering. It is the door of faery-land. In the middle of
night it swings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out. All night the
gay rabble sweep to and fro across the land, invisible to all, unless
perhaps where, in some more than commonly 'gentle' place--Drumcliff
or Drum-a-hair--the night-capped heads of faery-doctors may be thrust
from their doors to see what mischief the 'gentry' are doing. To their
trained eyes and ears the fields are covered by red-hatted riders, and
the air is full of shrill voices--a sound like whistling, as an ancient
Scottish seer has recorded, and wholly different from the talk of the
angels, who 'speak much in the throat, like the Irish,' as Lilly, the
astrologer, has wisely said. If there be a new-born baby or new-wed
bride in the neighbourhood, the night-capped 'doctors' will peer with
more than common care, for the unearthly troop do not always return
empty-handed. Sometimes a new-wed bride or a new-born baby goes with
them into their mountains; the door swings to behind, and the new-born
or the new-wed moves henceforth in the bloodless land of Faery; happy
enough, but doomed to melt out at the last judgment like bright vapour,
for the soul cannot live without sorrow. Through this door of white
stone, and the other doors of that land where _geabbeadh tu an sonas
aer pighin_ ('you can buy joy for a penny'), have gone kings, queens,
and princes, but so greatly has the power of Faery dwindled, that there
are none but peasants in these sad chronicles of mine.
Somewhere about the beginning of last century appeared at the western
corner of Market Street, Sligo, where the butcher's shop now is, not
a palace, as in Keats's _Lamia_, but an apothecary's shop, ruled over
by a certain unaccountable Dr. Opendon. Where he came from, none ever
knew. There also was in Sligo, in those days, a woman, Ormsby by name,
whose husband had fallen mysteriously sick. The doctors could make
nothing of him. Nothing seemed wrong with him, yet weaker and weaker he
grew. Away went the wife to Dr. Opendon. She was shown into the shop
parlour. A black cat was sitting straight up before the fire. She had
just time to see 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, and his wife walked behind him dressed in black likewise.
She gave him a guinea, and got a little bottle in return. Her husband
recovered that time. Meanwhile the black doctor cured many people; but
one day a rich patient 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 good-looking man, and his wife felt sure the 'gentry' were
coveting him. She went and called on the 'faery-doctor' at Cairnsfoot.
As soon as he had heard her tale, he went behind the back door and
began muttering, muttering, muttering--making spells. Her husband got
well this time also. But after a while he sickened again, the fatal
third time, and away went she once more to Cairnsfoot, and out went the
faery-doctor behind his back door and 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 after when she spoke of him Mrs. Ormsby shook
her head saying she knew well where he was, and it wasn't in heaven or
hell or purgatory either. She probably believed that a log of wood was
left behind in his place, but so 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 some
relations 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 woman
vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her
husband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he received
word in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured by
faeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longing
to see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to the
peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being
a dutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets of
Glasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She was
happy, 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 well
that she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faery
food, that she might keep him with her, refused, and came home to his
people 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, the
Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild
duck. 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 of
them 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
to find it was but faery glamour. To this hour on the border of the
lake is shown a half-dug trench--the signet of their impiety. A little
way from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of faery
kidnapping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, who
sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as
though 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 were
faeries, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band.
To him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when
she saw her old love, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest he
should eat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into
that bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards
with three of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until
he saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly
all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to
the house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the
keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic
poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my
white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.
Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the
living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John
Kirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[H] are a family much rumoured of
in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and a
spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read that the
mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe.
John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpool
with a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. That
evening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and asked
where 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 be
burnt to-night. ' He took his horse elsewhere, and sure enough the
stable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as reward to
ride as his jockey in the coming race, and then was gone. The race-time
came 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 in
my right hand bet all you are worth. ' 'For,' said Paddy Flynn, who told
me the tale, 'the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on making
the sign of the cross with it, and all that, come Christmas, and a
banshee, 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 John
Kirwan cleared the field out. When the race was over, 'What can I do
for you now? ' said he. 'Nothing but this,' said the boy: 'my mother
has a 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
ill follows them; but you will never see me more. ' With that he made
himself air, and vanished.
Sometimes animals are carried off--apparently drowned animals more than
others. In Claremorris, Galway, Paddy Flynn told me, lived a poor widow
with one cow and its calf. The cow fell into the river, and was washed
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 to take
the calf down to the edge of the river, and hide himself and watch.
He did as she had told him, and as evening came on the calf began
to low, and after a while the cow came along the edge of the river
and commenced suckling it. Then, as he had been told, he caught the
cow's tail. Away they went at a great pace, across hedges and ditches,
till they came to a royalty (a name for the little circular ditches,
commonly called raths or forts, that Ireland is covered with since
Pagan times). Therein he saw walking or sitting all the people who had
died out of his village in his time. A woman was sitting on the edge
with a child on her knees, and she called out to him to mind what the
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. That broke
the spell, and he was able to turn her homeward. 'Do not forget the
spancel,' said the woman with the child on her knees; 'take the inside
one. ' There were three spancels on a bush; he took one, and the cow was
driven safely home to the widow.
There is hardly a valley or mountain-side where folk cannot tell you of
some one pillaged from amongst them. Two or three miles from the Heart
Lake lives an old woman who was stolen away in her youth. After seven
years she was brought home again for some reason or other, but she had
no toes left. She had danced them off. Many near the white stone door
in Ben Bulben have been stolen away.
It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places
I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening by
the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint
mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily
discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures,
the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or
from the Heart Lake in the south.
FOOTNOTE:
[H] I have since heard that it was not the Kirwans, but their
predecessors at Castle Hacket, the Hackets themselves, I think, who
were descended from a man and a spirit, and were notable for beauty.
I imagine that the mother of Lord Cloncurry was descended from the
Hackets. It may well be that all through these stories the name of
Kirwan has taken the place of the older name. Legend mixes everything
together in her cauldron.
THE UNTIRING ONES
IT is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed
emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and
something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement
of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the
furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good 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 can the circles of
the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal peasants remember
this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of the heaviness of the
fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell 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 like a young woman, came
to a farmer's house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth and
setting all tidy. The next night they came again, and while the farmer
was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one room, and having
arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeur it seems, they
began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and days went by, and
all the country-side came to look at them, but still their feet 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, and went and told
them that the priest was coming. The little creatures when they heard
this went back to their own country, and there their joy shall last as
long as the points of the rushes are brown, the people 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 have
been men and women who, falling under their enchantment, have attained,
perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more than
faery abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have
gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty,
blown hither and thither by the winds that awakened the stars, the dim
kingdom has acknowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and
given them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in
the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat
by rocking her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and
said that the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the
dim kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old
and die while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would
be gifted with a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log
out of the fire and bury it in the garden, and her child would live
as long as it remained unconsumed. The mother buried the log, and the
child grew up, became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries,
who came to her at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince
died, and another prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful
peasant girl in his turn; and after another seven hundred years he died
also, and another prince and another husband came in his stead, and
so on until she had had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of
the parish called upon her, and told her that she was a scandal to the
whole neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was
very sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him
about the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and
then they burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and
everybody was pleased.
Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[I] who
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to 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 Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo.
The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log
and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled
hate 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.
FOOTNOTE:
[I] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would
mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a
very famous person, perhaps the mother of the gods herself. A friend
of mind found her, as he thinks, frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey
Lake on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or
the story-teller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many
Lough Leaths.
EARTH, FIRE AND WATER
SOME French writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desert
went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them
what they are. I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to
be even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be
that the elements have their children. If we knew the Fire Worshippers
better we might find that their centuries of pious observance have been
rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and
I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of
mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form
themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some
pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the Gods
everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that
communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories
of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our country people speak with
the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand
death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into
the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make
our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they
may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a
clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did
not the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of
water, and that 'even the generation of images in the mind is from
water'?
1902.
THE OLD TOWN
I FELL, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the power of
faery.
I had gone with a young man and his sister--friends and relations of my
own--to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were coming home
talking over what he had told us. It was dark, and our imaginations
were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may have brought
us, unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping and waking,
where Sphinxes and Chimaeras sit open-eyed and where there are always
murmurings and whisperings. I cannot think that what we saw was an
imagination of the waking mind. We had come under some trees that made
the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light moving slowly
across the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not see
anything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge of
the river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a
ruined church covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called
"the Old Town," which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell's
day. 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, mounting
up slowly towards the sky; then we saw other faint lights for a minute
or two, and at last a bright flame like the flame of a torch moving
rapidly over the river. We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems
all so unreal, that I have never written of it until now, and hardly
ever spoken of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasoning
impulse, I have avoided giving it weight in the argument. Perhaps
I have felt that my recollections of things seen when the sense of
reality was weakened must be untrustworthy. A few months ago, however,
I talked it over with my two friends, and compared their somewhat
meagre recollections with my own. That sense of unreality was all the
more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable
as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I
remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. The girl was
sitting reading under a large old-fashioned mirror, and I was reading
and writing a couple of yards away, when I heard a sound as if a shower
of peas had been thrown against the mirror, and while I was looking
at it I 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 the wainscoting beside my head. And after that for some days
came other sights and sounds, not to me but to the girl, her brother,
and the servants. Now it was a bright light, now it was letters of fire
that vanished before they could be read, now it was a heavy foot moving
about in the seemingly empty house. One wonders whether creatures who
live, the country people believe, wherever men and women have lived in
earlier times, followed us from the ruins of the old town? or did they
come from the banks of the river by the trees where the first light had
shone for a moment?
1902.
THE MAN AND HIS BOOTS
THERE was a doubter in Donegal, and he would not hear of ghosts or
sheogues, and there was a house in Donegal that had been haunted as
long as man could remember, and this is the story of how the house got
the better of the man. The man came into the house and lighted a fire
in the room under the haunted one, and took off his boots and set them
on the hearth, and stretched out his feet and warmed himself. For a
time he prospered in his unbelief; but a little while after the night
had fallen, and everything had got very dark, one of his boots began to
move. It got up off the floor and gave a kind of slow jump towards the
door, and then the other boot did the same, and after that the first
boot jumped again. And thereupon it struck the man that an invisible
being had got into his boots, and was now going away in them. When the
boots reached the door they went up-stairs slowly, and then the man
heard them go tramp, tramp round the haunted room over his head. A few
minutes passed, and he could hear them again upon the stairs, and after
that 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 along
towards him, and then one got up and hit him, and afterwards the other
hit him, and then again the first hit him, and so on, until they drove
him out of the room, and finally out of the house. In this way he was
kicked 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 of
the Sidhe, but the fantastic nature of the vengeance is like the work
of the Sidhe who live in the heart of phantasy.
A COWARD
ONE day I was at the house of my friend the strong farmer, who lives
beyond Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain, and met there a young lad who
seemed to be disliked by the two daughters. I asked why they disliked
him, and was told he was a coward. This interested me, for some whom
robust children of nature take to be cowards are but men and women with
a nervous system too finely made for their life and work. I looked at
the lad; but no, that pink-and-white face and strong body had nothing
of undue sensibility. After a little he told me his story. He had
lived a wild and reckless life, until one day, two years before, he
was coming home late at night, and suddenly felt himself sinking in,
as it were, upon the ghostly world. For a moment he saw the face of a
dead brother rise up before him, and then he turned and ran. He did not
stop till he came to a cottage nearly a mile down the road. He flung
himself against the door with so much of violence that he broke the
thick wooden bolt and fell upon the floor. From that day he gave up his
wild life, 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,
and he often went two miles round to avoid it; nor could, he said, 'the
prettiest girl in the country' persuade him to see her home after a
party if he were alone. He feared everything, for he had looked at the
face 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 dancing
there than upon the earth; and there is more treasure there than upon
the earth. In the beginning the earth was perhaps made to fulfil the
desire of man, but now it has got old and fallen into decay. What
wonder if we try and pilfer the treasures of that other kingdom!
A friend was once at a village near Sleive League. One day he was
straying about a rath called 'Cashel Nore. ' A man with a haggard face
and unkempt hair, and clothes falling in pieces, came into the rath and
began digging. My friend turned to a peasant who was working near and
asked who the man was. 'That is the third O'Byrne,' was the answer. A
few days after he learned this story: A great quantity of treasure had
been buried in the rath in pagan times, and a number of evil faeries
set to guard it; but some day it was to be found and belong to the
family of the O'Byrnes. Before that day three O'Byrnes must find it and
die. Two had already done so. The first had dug and dug until at last
he got a glimpse of the stone coffer that contained it, but immediately
a thing like a huge hairy dog came down the mountain and tore him to
pieces. The next morning the treasure had again vanished deep into
the earth. The second O'Byrne came and dug and dug until he found the
coffer, and lifted the lid and saw the gold shining within. He saw some
horrible sight the next moment, and went raving mad and soon died. The
treasure again sank out of sight. The third O'Byrne is now digging. He
believes that he will die in some terrible way the moment he finds the
treasure, but that the spell will be broken, and the O'Byrne family
made rich for ever, as they were of old.
A peasant of the neighbourhood once saw the treasure. He found the
shin-bone of a hare lying on the grass. He took it up; there was a hole
in it; he looked through the hole, and saw the gold heaped up under the
ground. He hurried home to bring a spade, but when he got to the rath
again 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,
time after time, and have gathered thus many a crumb of faery lore.
Drumcliff is a wide green valley, lying at the foot of Ben Bulben, the
mountain in whose side the square white door swings open at nightfall
to loose the faery riders on the world. The great Saint Columba
himself, the builder of many of the old ruins in the valley, climbed
the mountains 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 table-cloth, and lying in the foam midway between the
round cairn-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 and
rocks and grass: a mournful, haunted place. No wise peasant would fall
asleep under its low cliff, for he who sleeps here may wake 'silly,'
the 'good people' having carried off his soul. There is no more ready
short-cut to the dim kingdom than this plovery headland, for, covered
and smothered now from sight by mounds of sand, a long cave goes
thither 'full of gold and silver, and the most beautiful parlours and
drawing-rooms. ' Once, before the sand covered it, a dog strayed in, and
was heard yelping helplessly deep underground in a fort far inland.
These forts or raths, made before modern history had begun, cover all
Rosses and all Columkille. The one where the dog yelped has, like most
others, an underground beehive chamber in the midst. Once when I was
poking about there, an unusually intelligent and 'reading' peasant who
had come with me, and waited outside, knelt down by the opening, and
whispered in a timid voice, 'Are you all right, sir? ' I had been some
little while underground, and he feared I had been carried off like the
dog.
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
northern slope lie a few stray cottages. One night a farmer's young son
came from one of them and saw the fort all flaming, and ran towards
it, but the '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 a horse, and that all night long he went on the most
wonderful ride through the country. In the morning he was still beating
his fence, and they carried him home, where he remained a simpleton for
three years before he came to himself again. A little later a farmer
tried to level the fort. His cows and horses died, and all manner of
trouble overtook him, and finally he himself was led home, and left
useless with 'his head on his knees by the fire to the day of his
death. '
A few hundred yards southwards of the northern angle of Rosses is
another angle having also its cave, though this one is not covered with
sand. About twenty years ago a brig was wrecked near by, and three
or four fishermen were put to watch the deserted hulk through the
darkness. At midnight they saw sitting on a stone at the cave's mouth
two red-capped fiddlers fiddling with all their might. The men fled. A
great 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 of
never-fading mystery. When the aged countrywoman stands at her door
in the evening, and, in her own words, 'looks at the mountains and
thinks of the goodness of God,' God is all the nearer, because the
pagan powers are not far: because northward in Ben Bulben, famous for
hawks, the white square door swings open at sundown, and those wild
unchristian riders rush forth upon the fields, while southward the
White Lady, who is doubtless Maive herself, wanders under the broad
cloud nightcap of Knocknarea. How may she doubt these things, even
though the priest shakes his head at her? Did not a herd-boy, no long
while since, see the White Lady? She passed so close that the skirt of
her dress touched him. 'He fell down, and was dead three days. ' But
this is merely the small gossip of faerydom--the little stitches that
join this world and the other.
One night as I sat eating Mrs. H----'s soda-bread, her husband told me a
longish story, much the best of all I heard in Rosses. Many a poor man
from Fin M'Cool to our own days has had some such adventure to tell
of, for those creatures, the 'good people,' love to repeat themselves.
At any rate the story-tellers do. 'In the times when we used to travel
by the canal,' he said, 'I was coming down from Dublin. When we came to
Mullingar the canal ended, and I began to walk, and stiff and fatigued
I was after the slowness. I had some friends with me, and now and then
we walked, now and then we rode in a cart. So on till we saw some girls
milking cows, and stopped to joke with them. After a while we asked
them for a drink of milk. "We have nothing to put it in here," they
said, "but come to the house with us. " We went home with them, and sat
round 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 to
eat. There was a pot on the fire, and they took the meat out and put it
on 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. It
grew darker and darker, and there I still sat, loath as ever to leave
the good fire, and after a while two men came in, carrying between them
a corpse. When I saw them coming I hid behind the door. Says one to the
other, putting the corpse on the spit, "Who'll turn the spit? " Says
the other, "Michael H----, come out of that and turn the meat. " I came
out 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 you on
the spit instead"; and on that they went out. I sat there trembling
and turning the corpse till towards midnight. The men came again, and
the one said it was burnt, and the other said it was done right. But
having fallen out over it, they both said they would do me no harm that
time; 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
me by the shoulder, and put me out like a shot. It was a wild blowing
night. Never in all my born days did I see such a night--the darkest
night that ever came out of the heavens. I did not know where I was for
the life of me. So when one of the men came after me and touched me on
the shoulder, with a "Michael H----, can you tell a story now? " "I can,"
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 sitting here, and you
two men brought in a corpse and put it on the spit, and set me turning
it. " "That will do," says he; "ye may go in there and lie down on the
bed. " And I went, nothing loath; and in the morning where was I but in
the middle of a green field! '
'Drumcliff' is a great place for omens. Before a prosperous fishing
season a herring-barrel appears in the midst of a storm-cloud; and at a
place called Columkille's Strand, a place of marsh and mire, an ancient
boat, with Saint Columba himself, comes floating in from sea on a
moonlight night: a portent of a brave harvesting. They have their dread
portents too. Some few seasons ago a fisherman saw, far on the horizon,
renowned Hy Brazel, where he who touches shall find no more labour or
care, nor cynic laughter, but shall go walking about under shadiest
boscage, and enjoy the conversation of Cuchulain and his heroes. A
vision 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
in armour, shadow-hares, fire-tongued hounds, whistling seals, and so
on. A whistling seal sank a ship the other day. At Drumcliff there
is a very ancient graveyard. _The Annals of the Four Masters_ have
this verse about a soldier named Denadhach, who died in 871: 'A pious
soldier of the race of Con lies under hazel crosses at Drumcliff. ' Not
very long ago 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 was going. It was the 'pious soldier of the race of Con,' says
local wisdom, still keeping watch, with his ancient piety, over the
graveyard. Again, the custom is still common hereabouts of sprinkling
the doorstep with the blood of a chicken on the death of a very young
child, thus (as belief is) drawing into the blood the evil spirits from
the too weak soul. Blood is a great gatherer of evil spirits. To cut
your 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 on the slope of Ben Bulben, or even on the plain round Knocknarea.
There is a history concerning the house and the bush. A man once lived
there who found on the quay of Sligo a package containing three hundred
pounds in notes. It was dropped by a foreign sea captain. This my man
knew, but said nothing. It was money for freight, and the sea captain,
not daring to face his owners, committed suicide in mid-ocean. Shortly
afterwards my man died. His soul could not rest. At any rate, strange
sounds were heard round his house, though that had grown and prospered
since the freight money. The wife was often seen by those still alive
out in the garden praying at the bush I have spoken of, for the shade
of 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 put
spade 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, a
snipe flew out of the solid plaster and away; the troubled ghost, say
the neighbours, of the note-finder was at last dislodged.
My forebears and relations have lived near Rosses and Drumcliff these
many years. A few miles northward I am wholly a stranger, and can find
nothing. When I ask for stories of the faeries, my answer is some such
as was given me by a woman who lives near a white stone fort--one of
the 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
is dangerous to talk of the creatures. Only friendship for yourself
or knowledge of your forebears will loosen these cautious tongues. My
friend, 'the sweet Harp-String' (I give no more than his Irish name
for fear 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
prescriptive right to hear tell of all kind of other-world creatures.
They are almost relations of his, if all people say concerning the
parentage of magicians be true.
THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE
I
ONCE a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the
cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made
them feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil
himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows
with a hammer. It got white where the blows fell but did not break,
and they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet,
and worthy of every honour. In Ireland we have much kinship with the
Icelanders, or 'Danes' as we call them and all other dwellers in the
Scandinavian countries. In some of our mountainous and barren places,
and in our seaboard villages, we still test each other in much the same
way the Icelanders tested the head of Egil. We may have acquired the
custom from those ancient Danish pirates, whose descendants the people
of Rosses tell me still remember every field and hillock in Ireland
which once belonged to their forebears, and are able to describe Rosses
itself as well as any native. There is one seaboard district known as
Roughley, where the men are never known to shave or trim their wild red
beards, and where there is a fight ever on foot. I have seen them at a
boat-race fall foul of each other, and after much loud Gaelic, strike
each other with oars. The first boat had gone aground, and by dint
of hitting out with the long oars kept the second boat from passing,
only to give the victory to the third. One day the Sligo people say a
man from Roughley was tried in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row,
and made the defence not unknown in Ireland, that some heads are so
thin you cannot be responsible for them. Having turned with a look of
passionate contempt towards the solicitor who was prosecuting, and
cried, 'That little fellow's skull if ye were to hit it would go like
an 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 desolate
places. I may have been thinking of Moughorow, a much wilder place, for
the 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 his
deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the
valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all
things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow
under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must
needs think and think. One July a couple of years ago I took my supper
with a Captain Moran on board the ss. _Margaret_, that had put into a
western river from I know not where.
