Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/402

 MISCELLANEA.

Some Wexford Folklore.

I obtained the following fragments of folklore in the summer of 1894, in a place about five miles from Enniscorthy, co. Wex- ford, and I give them from notes taken at the time. Though I must regret that various circumstances rendered it impossible for me to take them down verbatim, they are given with absolute fidelity, without the smallest attempt at embellishment. (May this be excuse sufficient for baldness and flatness !) My principal informant was B., a farmer. Wherever I mention names in full they are the real ones.

Nocturjial Adventures, ^c.

A man was passing near Templeshanbo churchyard late one moonlight night when a hare, pursued by a greyhound, fled noise- lessly by him into the graveyard.

In the same place lights have been seen at the grave of one A. R., a lady of exemplary piety, on the night of her burial. Lights (though presumably of another character) have been seen on the sloping ground at R., great bushes all in a blaze, and in the morning no sign of fire whatever. There was a rath, or barrow, in that place.

B. remembers a servant " boy " of his grandfather's coming in one night nearly frightened to death at having seen an evil spirit, in the shape of a horse with a fiery tail, up the road near a house in which a certain bad person had recently died. The " boy " did not get over his fright for five or six weeks.

The road near C was formerly haunted by an evil spirit in the shape of a barrel.^ I think he used to kill people, but my inform- ant was discreedy vague on this point. Miss R., an old lady in the neighbourhood, remembers to have heard the noise of him. It is said that Father B. met him one night and exorcised him.

An old woman and her son were driving home in a donkey-cart late one night, when they saw a great pig by the road. " In the name of goodness," said the old woman, " whose pig is this out

' It is a curious fact that the Evil One takes this particular form in a fourteenth century French legend, to be found in Chron. St. Denis.

\