No More Learning

Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that
she had forgotten to leave window or door open, as the custom is, for
the departure of the soul. These strange openings and closings and
knockings were warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the
dying.

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

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

FOOTNOTE:

[B] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old Mayo woman,
who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw
'a woman with white borders to her cap going round the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months. '




'DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE. '


I

I HAVE been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones.