Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/185

 Rh forty years of age, who referred to such matters as having been told them by their parents, who were Irish speakers.

The tales were related to me by a "little lad" of fourteen, whose mother, in her turn, heard them in her youth from her father, John Tighe, of the townland of Cordery Peyton, the son of Peter Tighe of Corrick-beside-Laheen Peyton (co. Leitrim), both of whom were Irish speakers, and spoken of as great story-tellers. The lad, Michael McManus by name, son of Patrick McManus of Aughrim in Kiltubrid, very kindly wrote the tales down for me—for which I owe him my best thanks—and I have thought it proper to put them forward here in his own words without alteration. It may be worth while to add that, so far as the family knew, the tales had never appeared in print.

There do not appear to be any customs peculiar to the immediate neighbourhood, but it may here be noted that fires are still lighted on the hills and along the sides of the roads on Saint John's Eve.

That the fairies are fallen angels is a widely spread belief, but still it is interesting to compare the ideas of the people in different localities on this subject. This is the Kiltubrid version: "Who are the fairies?" I asked one evening of a country woman. "The Good People (God speed them!) is it?" said she. "Well, I have heard that when there was war in heaven, and the wicked angels were being cast out, that St. John asked the Almighty would he waste the whole heavens and earth? So God said, 'Let everything stand as it is!' and so everything remained as it was that instant, and that is why there are fairies in the air (you've heard noises in the air, haven't you?), and on the earth, and under the earth."

A belief in the "good people" is, of course, very general. Cashels or forts in the fields—those round earthworks, common in many parts of the country—are held to be