e of
alternatives. Near to the spot, at least within two or three hundred
yards of it, was a barrow, close to which a sacrificial stone had been
unearthed; consequently the phantasm may have been a barrowvian; and
again, as the locality is much wooded and but thinly populated, it may
have been a vagrarian; and again, the burial-ground being in such close
proximity, the apparition may well have been the phantasm of one of the
various personalities of a human being interred there.

One night, as I was sitting reading alone in an isolated cottage on the
Wicklow hills, I was half-startled out of my senses by hearing a loud,
menacing cry, half-human and half-animal, and apparently in mid-air,
directly over my head. I looked up, and to my horror saw suspended, a
few feet above me, the face of a Dalmatian dog--of a long since dead
Dalmatian dog, with glassy, expressionless eyes, and yellow, gaping
jaws. The phenomenon did not last more than half a minute, and with its
abrupt disappearance came a repetition of the cry. What was it? I
questioned the owner of the cottage, and she informed me she had always
had the sensation something uncanny walked the place at night, but had
never seen anything. "One of my children did, though," she added;
"Mike--he was drowned at sea twelve months ago. Before he became a
sailor he lived with me here, and often used to see a dog--a big,
spotted cratur, like what we called a plum-pudding dog. It was a nasty,
unwholesome-looking thing, he used to tell me, and would run round and
round his room--the room where you sleep--at night. Though a bold enough
lad as a rule, the thing always scared him; and he used to come and tell
me about it, with a face as white as linen--'Mother!' he would say, 'I
saw the spotted cratur again in the night, and I couldn't get as much as
a wink of sleep.' He would sometimes throw a boot at it, and always with
the same result--the boot would go right through it." She then told me
that a former tenant of the house, who had borne an evil reputation in
the village--the peasants unanimously declaring she was a witch--had
died, so it was said, in my room. "But, of course," she added, "it
wasn't her ghost that Mike saw." Here I disagreed with her. However, if
she could not come to any conclusion, neither could I; for though, of
course, the dog may have been the earth-bound spirit of some
particularly carnal-minded occupant of the cottage--or, in other words,
a phantasm represent