eel an artistic and humorous pleasure in
their doings. The ghosts themselves share in their quaint hilarity. In
one western town, on whose deserted wharf the grass grows, these spirits
have so much vigour that, when a misbeliever ventured to sleep in a
haunted house, I have been told they flung him through the window, and
his bed after him. In the surrounding villages the creatures use the
most strange disguises. A dead old gentleman robs the cabbages of his
own garden in the shape of a large rabbit. A wicked sea-captain stayed
for years inside the plaster of a cottage wall, in the shape of a snipe,
making the most horrible noises. He was only dislodged when the wall was
broken down; then out of the solid plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.

"DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE"

I

I have been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, "There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee," and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, "That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow"--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--"and she had
blushes in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers,