ung the dust in my face,
And, while I sneezed,
Was gone!

WILLIAM ALLINGHAM.

Daniel O'Rourke

People may have heard of the renowned adventures of Daniel O'Rourke, but
how few are there who know that the cause of all his perils, above and
below, was neither more nor less than his having slept under the walls
of the Pooka's Tower. I knew the man well. He lived at the bottom of
Hungry Hill, just at the right-hand side of the road as you go towards
Bantry. An old man was he at the time he told me the story, with grey
hair and a red nose; and it was on the 25th of June, 1813, that I heard
it from his own lips, as he sat smoking his pipe under the old poplar
tree, on as fine an evening as ever shone from the sky. I was going to
visit the caves in Dursey Island, having spent the morning at
Glengariff.

"I am often axed to tell it, sir," said he, "so that this is not the
first time. The master's son, you see, had come from beyond foreign
parts in France and Spain, as young gentlemen used to go before
Buonaparte or any such was heard of; and, sure enough, there was a
dinner given to all the people on the ground, gentle and simple, high
and low, rich and poor. The _ould_ gentlemen were the gentlemen, after
all, saving your honour's presence. They'd swear at a body a little, to
be sure, and, maybe, give one a cut of a whip now and then, but we were
no losers by it in the end; and they were so easy and civil, and kept
such rattling houses, and thousands of welcomes; and there was no
grinding for rent, and there was hardly a tenant on the estate that did
not taste of his landlord's bounty often and often in a year; but now
it's another thing. No matter for that, sir, for I'd better be telling
you my story.

"Well, we had everything of the best, and plenty of it; and we ate, and
we drank, and we danced, and the young master, by the same token, danced
with Peggy Barry, from the Bohereen--a lovely young couple they were,
though they are both low enough now. To make a long story short, I got,
as a body may say, the same thing as tipsy almost, for I can't remember,
ever at all, no ways, how it was I left the place; only I did leave it,
that's certain. Well, I thought, for all that, in myself, I'd just step
to Molly Cronohan's, the fairy woman, to speak a word about the bracket
heifer that was bewitched; and so, as I was crossing the stepping-stones
of the ford of Ballyashenogh, and was looking up at the star