Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/238

228 people were naturally sceptical, and treated the whole story as an absurdity; yet many people who live in the district believe implicitly that the children did not lie. That the appearance of the black pig portends serious trouble in Ireland is generally believed, and legends relate that all along and north of the valley of the Black Pig there will be awful slaughter of the Irish race. The pig was prophesied to appear thrice during the Great War, and if he could run along the valley to Lough Boderg, near Kilmore, there would be great trouble, which could only be averted by a one-eyed marksman shooting the animal at Bonnyaglass, a field behind Kilmore Rectory."

The re-appearance of the Black Pig at this moment appears to be by no means an accidental occurrence. The so-called Prophecy of St. Columcille, to which reference is made, is a long, ill-written, and quite recent prose tract which has been widely circulated and is firmly believed in the North of Ireland. It foretells a massacre of the Catholics by the English (or sometimes by the Orangemen) in the Valley of the Black Pig, and it contains such blood- curdling details as these: a "Black Bill" will be passed by the English Parliament and "will be privately communicated to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (said to be Lord Abercorn), who will call upon all the Protestant Clergy of Ireland to appear in Dublin and, under Seal of Secrecy, to sign the Bill." We are glad to find that there are five righteous men among them who refuse to sign so nefarious an act, the purport of which is thus described: "The purpose of the bill is to murder the Catholics, as far as the strength of the Protestant army can go over the kingdom; and that will be the parts of the Land called the Valley of the Black Pig, comprehended in the Province of Ulster, the Counties of Sligo and Leitrim in Connaught, north of the Shannon River, and the County of Longford and the North-Western corner of West-Meath and East-Meath, aided and assisted by ten thousand of the Scotch