those that are
in the waters take often the shape of fish. A woman of Burren, in
Galway, says, 'There are more of them in the sea than on the land, and
they sometimes try to come over the side of the boat in the form of
fishes, for they can take their choice shape.' At other times they are
beautiful women; and another Galway woman says, 'Surely those things are
in the sea as well as on land. My father was out fishing one night off
Tyrone. And something came beside the boat that had eyes shining like
candles. And then a wave came in, and a storm rose all in a minute, and
whatever was in the wave, the weight of it had like to sink the boat.
And then they saw that it was a woman in the sea that had the shining
eyes. So my father went to the priest, and he bid him always to take a
drop of holy water and a pinch of salt out in the boat with him, and
nothing could harm him.'

The poem was suggested to me by a Greek folk song; but the folk belief
of Greece is very like that of Ireland, and I certainly thought, when I
wrote it, of Ireland, and of the spirits that are in Ireland. An old man
who was cutting a quickset hedge near Gort, in Galway, said, only the
other day, 'One time I was cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight
o'clock one morning, when I got there, I saw a girl picking nuts, with
her hair hanging down over her shoulders; brown hair; and she had a
good, clean face, and she was tall, and nothing on her head, and her
dress no way gaudy, but simple. And when she felt me coming she gathered
herself up, and was gone, as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I
followed her, and looked for her, but I never could see her again from
that day to this, never again.'

The county Galway people use the word 'clean' in its old sense of fresh
and comely.

MICHAEL ROBARTES BIDS HIS BELOVED BE AT PEACE.

November, the old beginning of winter, or of the victory of the Fomor,
or powers of death, and dismay, and cold, and darkness, is associated by
the Irish people with the horse-shaped Pucas, who are now mischievous
spirits, but were once Fomorian divinities. I think that they may have
some connection with the horses of Mannannan, who reigned over the
country of the dead, where the Fomorian Tethra reigned also; and the
horses of Mannannan, though they could cross the land as easily as the
sea, are constantly associated with the waves. Some neo-platonist, I
forget who, describes the sea as a symbol of the drifting indefin