Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/440

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"Muinntir Fhionlaidh" were a numerous band of fairies. Hence the Gaelic proverb current on the island of Lewis, "Cho lionmhor ri muinntir Fhionlaidh." They were believed to be the strong gusts of wind that sometimes occur on calm days and carry along with them dust and straws, &c. It was believed long ago in my native place that they thus carried with them imperceptibly for short distances one caught sleeping in their track. I know a place where it is said they so carried one from a knoll near a river to a knoll on the opposite side, yet he found himself none the worse of the journey, as he might have had good reason to expect, when he awoke. Hence the malediction, "Togail Muinntir Fhionlaidh ort," i.e. "May you get the lifting or the taking away of the Finlay people."

In one of the islands of the west, not many miles as the crow flies from the place in which the writer lives, the story is told that a shepherd's dogs, his own dogs, unaccountably and unprovoked, attacked him so fiercely in a secluded spot of the moor, quite close to the sea, that he barely escaped with his life. This part of the story is well authenticated. The origin of the story is this. A stranger, a packman, lodged with this shepherd over night. The following morning they were seen leaving the house in company in the direction of that part of the moor where the dogs attacked him. The stranger went amissing and was never heard of again. The belief was that the shepherd murdered him there, and that he was attacked there by his own dogs the first time he visited that very spot with them. Can any scientific explanation be given of so strange an occurrence?

I used to hear it confidently asserted in my young days on the island of Lewis that if one carried a Latin New Testament about his person no Bochan would ever trouble him, however much a place might be haunted by them. It is obvious this superstition came down to us from Roman Catholic times. One does not hear this superstition even mentioned at the present day.