Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/240

 178 Page 17, line 9. Pistrogue, or pishogue, is a common Anglo-Irish word for a charm or spell. Archbishop MacHale derived it from two words,, "knowledge of fairies," which seems hardly probable.

Page 19. "A fiery cloud out of her neck." Thus, in Dr. Atkinson's, from the "Leabhar Breac," the devil appears in the form of an Ethiopian, and according to the Irish translator,. "There used to come a fierce flame out of his neck and nose, like the flame of a furnace of fire."

Page 19. According to another version of this story, the blind man was Ossian (whose name is in Ireland usually pronounced Essheen or Ussheen) himself, and he got Bran's pups hung up by their teeth to the skin of a newly-killed horse, and all the pups let go their hold except this black one, which clung to the skin and hung out of it. Then Ossian ordered the others to be drowned and kept this. In this other version, the coal which he throws at the infuriated pup was, "a hatchet or something." There must be some confusion in this story, since Ossian was not blind during Bran's lifetime, nor during the sway of the Fenians. The whole thing appears to be a bad version of Campbell's story, No. XXXI., Vol. II., p. 103. The story may, however, have some relation to the incident in that marvellous tale called "The Fort of the little Red Yeoha", in which we are told how Conan looked out of the fort, , i.e., "he saw one youth coming to him, and he having a short black hound on an iron chain in his hand, and it is a wonder that it would not burn the fort with every ball of fire it would shoot out of its gullet, and out of its foam-mouth." This hound is eventually killed by Bran, but only after Conan had taken off "the shoe of refined silver that was on Bran's right paw". Bran figures largely in Fenian literature.

[I believe this is the only place in which Finn's mother is described as a fawn, though in the prose sequel to the "Lay of the Black Dog" (Leab. na Feinne, p. 91) it is stated that Bran, by glamour of the Lochlanners, is made to slay the Fenian women and children in the seeming of deer. That Finn enjoyed the favours of a princess bespelled as a fawn is well known; also that Oisin's mother was a fawn (see the reference in Arg. Tales, p. 470). The narrator may have jumbled these stories together in his memory.