Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/239

Rh mob commanded by one Campbell, of the Argyle family; will be the actors in the bloody deed" "The massacre will begin, after the putting out of a false notice all over Ireland to lull the Catholics into security, at 11 o'cl. on a Sunday night," the squadrons of the enemy having put to sea on Friday. There will be a thick mist and fog, and on the day of the carnage it is to be as dark as night, "and will be so all over the Valley of the Black Pig, unto the end of the business, which will last and continue for four nights and three and a half days, i.e. from Sunday night at 11 o'c. to the next Thursday forenoon between 10-11 o'c." Above three thousand souls will be saved in the dens and caves of two mountains in Donegal, but in no other parts of the province of Ulster or any of the places above mentioned. "But the only part of real safety will be the west part of the County of Galway and Mayo, near the shore of the West Sea." Elsewhere it is said that the massacre will last for eight weeks, and that 40,000 Catholics will be butchered in the Valley of the Black Pig.

It is comforting to find that all these fearful happenings were to take place "in the reign of the thirteenth King and Queen from the commencement of heresy in England " [i.e. in the reign of George IV. or William IV., the thirteenth sovereign of England as we include or exclude Henry VIIL himself), so that they may be peacefully looked upon as being in the past, not in the future. It is called the Battle of Saingail, and is connected with the downfall of England, which country is to be beaten by the Scotch, and whose downfall is announced in these highly poetic words:

and the prophecy adds: "The Saxons will flee beyond the Sea, and not remember to come back, according to Berchain the sage; in my book I found it." It is no doubt especially this cheery prognostication of England's