Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/25

Rh in the Irish manuscript: "And he (Iollann) was not long at this, until he saw the devilish misformed element, and the fierce and horrible spectre, and the gloomy disgusting enemy, and the morose unlovely churl ; and this is how he was: he held a very thick iron flail-club in his skinny hand, and twenty chains out of it, and fifty apples on each chain of them, and a venomous spell on each great apple of them, and a girdle of the skins of deer and roebuck around the thing that was his body, and one eye in the forehead of his black-faced countenance, and one bare, hard, very hairy hand coming out of his chest, and one veiny, thick-soled leg supporting him and a close, firm, dark blue mantle of twisted hard-thick feathers, protecting his body, and surely he was more like unto devil than to man." This creature inhabited a desert, as the Highlander said, and were it not for this corroborating Scotch tradition, I should not have hesitated to put down the whole incident as the whimsical invention of some Irish writer, the more so as I had never heard any accounts of this wonderful creature in local tradition. This discovery of his counterpart in the Highlands puts a new complexion on the matter. Is the Highland spectre derived from the Irish manuscript story, or does the writer of the Irish story only embody in his tale a piece of folk-lore common at one time to all branches of the Gaelic race, and now all but extinct. This last supposition is certainly the true one, for it is