No More Learning

There was a man in my place,
a tearing fellow, and he put one of them down. He went out to meet it
on the road, but he must have been told the words. But the faeries are
the best neighbours. If you do good to them they will do good to you,
but they don't like you to be on their path. ' Another time she said to
me, 'They are always good to the poor. '


II

There is, however, a man in a Galway village who can see nothing but
wickedness. Some think him very holy, and others think him a little
crazed, but some of his talk reminds one of those old Irish visions of
the Three Worlds, which are supposed to have give Dante the plan of
the _Divine Comedy_. But I could not imagine this man seeing Paradise.
He is especially angry with the people of faery, and describes the
faun-like feet that are so common among them, who are indeed children
of Pan, to prove them children of Satan. He will not grant that 'they
carry away women, though there are many that say so,' but he is certain
that they are 'as thick as the sands of the sea about us, and they
tempt poor mortals. '

He says, 'There is a priest I know of was looking along the ground like
as if he was hunting for something, and a voice said to him, "If you
want to see them you'll see enough of them," and his eyes were opened
and he saw the ground thick with them. Singing they do be sometimes,
and dancing, but all the time they have cloven feet. ' Yet he was so
scornful of unchristian things for all their dancing and singing that
he thinks that 'you have only to bid them begone and they will go. It
was one night,' he says, 'after walking back from Kinvara and down by
the wood beyond I felt one coming beside me, and I could feel the horse
he was riding on and the way he lifted his legs, but they do not make
a sound like the hoofs of a horse. So I stopped and turned around and
said, very loud, "Be off!
" and he went and never troubled me after. And
I knew a man who was dying, and one came on his bed, and he cried out
to it, "Get out of that, you unnatural animal! " and it left him. Fallen
angels they are, and after the fall God said, "Let there be Hell," and
there it was in a moment. ' An old woman who was sitting by the fire
joined in as he said this with 'God save us, it's a pity He said the
word, and there might have been no Hell the day,' but the seer did not
notice her words. He went on, 'And then he asked the devil what would
he take for the souls of all the people. And the devil said nothing
would satisfy him but the blood of a virgin's son, so he got that, and
then the gates of Hell were opened. ' He understood the story, it seems,
as if it were some riddling old folk tale.

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

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