nd a
Banshee, or such like, would no more mind than if it was that broom."
Well, the slip of a boy struck the horse with his right hand, and John
Kirwan cleared the field out. When the race was over, "What can I do
for you now?" said he. "Nothing but this," said the boy: "my mother has
a cottage on your land-they stole me from the cradle. Be good to her,
John Kirwan, and wherever your horses go I will watch that no ill
follows them; but you will never see me more." With that he made
himself air, and vanished.

Sometimes animals are carried off--apparently drowned animals more
than others. In Claremorris, Galway, Paddy Flynn told me, lived a poor
widow with one cow and its calf. The cow fell into the river, and was
washed away. There was a man thereabouts who went to a red-haired woman
--for such are supposed to be wise in these things--and she told him to
take the calf down to the edge of the river, and hide himself and
watch. He did as she had told him, and as evening came on the calf
began to low, and after a while the cow came along the edge of the
river and commenced suckling it. Then, as he had been told, he caught
the cow's tail. Away they went at a great pace across hedges and
ditches, till they came to a royalty (a name for the little circular
ditches, commonly called raths or forts, that Ireland is covered with
since Pagan times). Therein he saw walking or sitting all the people
who had died out of his village in his time. A woman was sitting on the
edge with a child on her knees, and she called out to him to mind what
the red-haired woman had told him, and he remembered she had said,
Bleed the cow. So he stuck his knife into the cow and drew blood. That
broke the spell, and he was able to turn her homeward. "Do not forget
the spancel," said the woman with the child on her knees; "take the
inside one." There were three spancels on a bush; he took one, and the
cow was driven safely home to the widow.

There is hardly a valley or mountainside where folk cannot tell you of
some one pillaged from amongst them. Two or three miles from the Heart
Lake lives an old woman who was stolen away in her youth. After seven
years she was brought home again for some reason or other, but she had
no toes left. She had danced them off. Many near the white stone door
in Ben Bulben have been stolen away.

It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places
I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads