Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/371

 Folk-'falcs from Wcstcjni Ireland. 339

When he had told me tin's a neic^hbour's daughter, who had come into the cottage, said that there was a hawthorn tree near her house, from which not long ago a man had cut a bough, and soon afterwards a strange little white woman came in at the door.

A Death Apparition.

A young girl, Catherine Conor, of Killeaden, was lying awake in her bed in the kitchen, when she saw a strange little man standing by the dresser, looking at her. She got very frightened, and jumped out of bed and ran to the recess where her father and mother slept. When she looked back the little man had gone. Three months after- wards she was standing on Lis Ard, and felt hands take her and throw her forward. She went to America and said she would die on Lady Day, the 25th of March. She became ill, and died, as she had foretold, on Lady Day.

Fairy Music.

A ruin, a castle, stands in a field near the road to Foxford. An old man, named Scanlon, passing by the castle heard the music of bag-pipes. " It was fine, beautiful music, very clear," he said. Yet he found no piper in the castle, nor any man nor woman when he went in.

A Tale ok a Funeral.

Anthony O'Neill, who lives on the road to Foxford, declared the two following stories were his own personal experience, but they arc familiar to me, and clearly folk- tales. When he was a boy, he said, his father burnt a kiln of lime, and put him to mind it the second night. As he sat there he saw a funeral coming down the hill, and two men carrying a coffin. They came up to the kiln, and one