No More Learning

' I told her once of somebody who saw a faery and
fainted, and she said, 'It could not have been a faery, but some bad
thing, nobody could faint at a faery. It was a demon. I was not afraid
when they near put me, and the bed under me, out through the roof. I
wasn't afraid either when you were at some work and I heard a thing
coming flop-flop up the stairs like an eel, and squealing. It went to
all the doors. It could not get in where I was. I would have sent it
through the universe like a flash of fire. There was a man in my place,
a tearing fellow, and he put one of them down. He went out to meet 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.