bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest be should
eat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into that
bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards with
three of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until he
saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly
all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to the
house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the
keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic
poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my
white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.

Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the
living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John
Kirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[FN#8] are a family much rumoured
of in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and
a spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read that
the mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe.

[FN#8] I have since heard that it was not the Kirwans, but their
predecessors at Castle Hacket, the Hackets themselves, I think, who
were descended from a man and a spirit, and were notable for beauty. I
imagine that the mother of Lord Cloncurry was descended from the
Hackets. It may well be that all through these stories the name of
Kirwan has taken the place of the older name. Legend mixes everything
together in her cauldron.

John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpool
with a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. That
evening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and asked
where he was stabling his horse. In such and such a place, he answered.
"Don't put him there," said the slip of a boy; "that stable will be
burnt to-night." He took his horse elsewhere, and sure enough the
stable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as reward to
ride as his jockey in the coming race, and then was gone. The race-time
came round. At the last moment the boy ran forward and mounted, saying,
"If I strike him with the whip in my left hand I will lose, but if in
my right hand bet all you are worth." For, said Paddy Flynn, who told
me the tale, "the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on making
the sign of the cross with it, and all that, come Christmas, a