The Celtic Twilight | Page 7

he said--"she with respectable people to appear to." He
was convinced by the three marks, and the children were taken from the
workhouse. The priest said the masses, and the shade must have been at
rest, for it has not since appeared. Some time afterwards Jim
Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty
through drink.
I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon the
quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, sees
a woman with white borders to her cap[FN#2] creep out and follow
him. The apparition only leaves him at his own door. The villagers
imagine that she follows him to avenge some wrong. "I will haunt you
when I die" is a favourite threat. His wife was once half-scared to death
by what she considers a demon in the shape of a dog.
[FN#2] 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-inlaw saw "a woman with white borders to her cap going
around the stacks in a field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in
six months."
These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe
gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy's
Lane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She
did not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The
knocking ceased. After a little the front-door and then the back-door
were burst open, and closed again. Her husband went to see what was
wrong. He found both doors bolted. The child died. The doors were
again opened and closed as before. 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.
"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