Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/311

 The Irish '' Mirabilia. 303

Norse, through a popular interpretation of his name as Pad-rekr, ' toad-expeller", from padda, 'toad', and ?-eka, 'to expel'.^ — Gir. i, 28 and 29.

4. This is also said about Ireland, that no other island of its size contains an equally large number of holy men.

5. This is also said, that the people who inhabit that land are both fierce among themselves and bloodthirsty and very savage ; but however bloodthirsty they are, and however many holy men there are in their land, they never slew one of them, and all these holy men that there are have died through sickness ; because they that are fierce among themselves have ever been kindly towards all good men and holy.

Solin. 22, 3 : ^ Gens in/iospita et bellicosa. Sangume inierem- ptoruvi hausto prius victores vultus stws ohlinufit. Fas ac fiefas eodem loco di'.cunt.' Giraldus' remarks on the character of the Irish are well known. The curious statement that in spite of this temper of the inhabitants there were no Irish martyrs, is also in Giraldus (iii, 31), where see also the spirited retort of the Arch- bishop of Cashel to Giraldus' sneering remark. That there were no Irish martyrs is, of course, not correct, though certainly out of the large number of Irish saints very few are stated to have suffered martyrdom.

6. There is also a certain lake in that land, about the nature of which a wonder is told. That lake is called in their tongue Loch Echach (Lough Neagh). That lake is very large in size. And this is the nature of that water. If you take the wood that some call beimvi^^ and some Jiulfr (holly), and which in Latin is called acrifolmni, and you place it in the water so that some of it stands in the earth below, and some in the water, and some up out of the water, then that which stands in the earth below turns into iron, and that which is in the water into stone, and the wood

1 In the Leabhar Breac Life of St. Columba (Stokes, Three Irish Homilies^ p. 121) that saint is said to have banished toads and snakes out of lona.