Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/247

 Rh The memory of these formidable guests is nearly vanished, and the boccuch in our story is only a feeble old beggarman. I fancy this tale of evicting the alt-pluachra family from their human abode is fathered upon a good many people as well as upon the father of the present MacDermot. [Is the peasant belief in the Alp-Luachra the originating idea of the well-known Irish Rabelaisian 14th century tale "The Vision of McConglinny?"—A.N.]

Page 73. The weasel, like the cat, is an animal that has many legends and superstitions attaching to it. I remember hearing from an old shanachie, now unfortunately dead, a long and extraordinary story about the place called Chapelizod, a few miles from Dublin, which he said was, the "weasel's chapel," in Irish, but which is usually supposed to have received its name from the Princess Iseult of Arthurian romance. The story was the account of how the place came by this name. How he, who was a Connachtman, and never left his native county except to reap the harvest in England, came by this story I do not know; but I imagine it must have been told him by some one in the neighbourhood, in whose house he spent the night, whilst walking across the island on his way to Dublin or Drogheda harbour. The weasel is a comical little animal, and one might very well think it was animated with a spirit. I have been assured by an old man, and one whom I have always found fairly veracious, that when watching for ducks beside a river one evening a kite swooped down and seized a weasel, with which it rose up again into the air. His brother fired, and the kite came down, the weasel still in its claws, and unhurt. The little animal then came up, and stood in front of the two men where they sat, and nodded and bowed his head to them about twenty times over; "it was," said the old man, "thanking us he was." The weasel is a desperate fighter, and always makes for the throat. What, however, in Ireland is called a weazel, is really a stoat, just as what is called a crow in Ireland is really a rook, and what is called a crane is really a heron.

Cáuher-na-mart, to which Paudyeen (diminutive of Paddy) was bound, means the "city of the beeves," but is now called in English Westport, one of the largest towns in Mayo. It was apropos of its long and desolate streets of ruined stores, with nothing in them, that some one remarked he saw Ireland's characteristics there in a nutshell—"an itch after greatness and nothingness;" a remark which was applicable enough to the squireocracy and bourgeoisie of the last century.