Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/313

 The Irish ''Mirabilia. 30^

and grows with the other hmd, as if it had always been with it. And when that time comes, then it sounds to men as if a great din came, Hke a thunderclap, and after, when the thunder has gone, men see such another islet in the water as before there was, of the same size and the same nature. And so it happens every seventh year after another, that as soon as one islet grows with the mainland, then comes another, and yet no one knows whence it comes.

I do not know which lake is meant by Loghica. There is nothing either in the Irish Mirabilia or in Giraldus at all like this story. But Giraldus tells a similar story of one of the lakes on Snowdon, and in a seventeenth-century Memorial of the most rare and wonderfull things in Scotland, by John Monipennie,^ I find the following : — ' In Lennox is a great loch, called Loch Lowmond, 24 miles in length, and in bredth 8 miles, containing the number of 30 isles. In this loch is observed 3 wonderfull things .... the 3rd is one of these isles that is not corroborat, nor united to the ground, but hath beene perpetually loose ; and although it bee fertill of good grasse, and replenished with neate, yet it mooves by the waves of the water, and is transported some times towards one point, and otherwhiles towards another.'

9. Then there is also a small island in that land, which in their tongue is called Inhisgluer (Inishglory). There is a large settlement of men in that island, and there is a church in it, because there are as many people in the island as a parish must have. And though men die there, they are not buried in the earth, but they are raised up round about the church in the churchyard, and stand upright like living men with all their limbs all dried, and all their hair and nails unscathed, and they never decay, and birds never perch on them. And in that way anyone that lives afterwards may there recognise his father or his father's father, and all his race, from whom he is descended.

^ Printed at Brittaines Bursse, by John Budge, 1612. Reprinted 1820, Glasgow, in the Miscellanea Scotica, vol. i, pp. 198-202. VOL. V. X