Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/245

Rh easily caught, he jumps and flies so quickly, that when one thinks he has got hold of him he only finds he has gone, to appear somewhere else. A man once saw him on Octomore Moss, and ran after him. He got his foot on his top and thought he had killed him, but all at once he saw him a piece away as brisk as ever."

By another Islay woman it is said: "Will-o'-the-Wisp is a very bad thing. It just appears for the purpose of leading people astray and bringing them to their end. There was a man who was out at night, and he saw a Will-o'-the-Wisp going before him. He thought it was a light from a house, and he made for it. When he would reach where he thought it had been, he would find it as far away before him as ever. It cheated him in that way for a long time, and the next day he was found dead in a peat bank." There can be little doubt that the reciter gave here, at second hand and in all honesty, a story out of a "prent buk."

In Mrs. McL.'s account, now to be given very nearly in her own words, we seem to be nearer something native to the soil. "Oh yes, a ghradh (she was not addressing the white-bearded, bald-headed compiler), Willie Wisp is plenty true. He's a man that goes running inside fire, here and there, wherever there is to be trouble, and tells people beforehand that it is coming. He does not bring the trouble, but he comes before it. You see, a ghradh, the [Christian] faith is strong now, and there are not so many things seen now as there used to be, but it is plenty true that the hills were open many a time. I did not see them open in my day, but for all that they were open in many a place not that long since." Here he appears in the thoroughly Gaelic character of manadh, and is credited with no active malfeasance himself. Mrs. McL. does not seem to have fathomed all his capacity of evil.

"The Jinn," says Sir R. Burton, "lights a fire to decoy