Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/122

90 At a lake not very far from Mohill, Co. Leitrim, the following occurrence is said to have taken place.

The son of a farmer living alongside of its margin used to lay night lines for pike. But early one morning he went to examine his lines, and on trying to draw one of them in a monstrous eel with a mane hanging behind his head rose out of the water, and followed him over the land almost to his house, then turning back broke the line and dived to the bottom of the lake.

A story very circumstantially told lately appeared in the papers of a man being chased by a monstrous eel near Wattle Bridge on the Upper L. Erne.

In Monaghan and Tyrone the little dwarf sprites that frequent ancient woodlands and wild waste lands are called by the latter name.

The little wood of Creaghan, beside Favour Royal, belonging to me, which is a remnant of the old oak forest land of the country, is notoriously the resort of these “gentry.” One of my employés, cutting scollops for thatch about the year 1860, stooping down with his knife in hand almost touched one that was sitting in the centre of the tuft of young shoots. Horridly scared at the little wizened face peering up at him crowned with a red pointed cap, he jumped back and cried out to his fellow. The two then returned, but, of course, the loughrey-man had vanished, for if you take your eyes off them they disappear in a moment. But the woodman assured me that they found “his little nest still warm in the heart of the bush.” A woodkeeper also told me that he had himself never met with one, but frequently heard them walking alongside him in the evening, but hidden by the foliage.

At Lemaculla, about half-a-mile from Drumreaske, Co. Monaghan, a woman lived, named Mary M‘Kenna. One day, returning to her cottage in full daylight (she lived alone), she saw a little loughrey-man sitting at the fire with a small pot in his hand full of gold pieces, which he was counting. He was