Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/114

102 court on the island. Should any one have the misfortune to be carried away, like Proserpina, to the underworld, he must be careful to eat no fairy food or the kidnapped person is held prisoner to the end of the world. One young man incautiously slept under a rick on a Friday night and was carried off to the palace and told to help the cook. To his horror he saw that the fairies were preparing as meat for the feast an old woman, whom they were skinning as she hung from a hook. He was told she was a miser and had a bitter tongue, hence her fate. When the feast was served he excused himself from eating on the pretence that no priest was there to bless the food, but, tempted by the wine, he drank off a cupful, became insensible, and (when he awoke) found himself under the rick. He never recovered, but pined away and died.

Another story on Inishark told how a girl whose lover had been killed was weeping for his loss one sunset when a woman approached. The stranger made her look through a ring of herbs and a wreath, off which she was to pluck a leaf, without signing the cross. One day her mother saw her doing the spell and broke into prayer, when the girl screamed that the dead were coming for her and fell senseless. The priest was hastily brought and sprinkled her with holy water, when the evil spirits left her, but, like the hero of the Bofin tale, she withered away and soon died. The looking through a ring reminds one of a tale of the goddess fairy Aine at Knockainey, Co. Limerick, who showed a girl a ring through which she saw the holy hill covered with fairies.

Otway tells of a man at Portacloy on the north coast of Mayo, who, returning to it from Porturlin, followed a guiding line of white stones over the intervening upland, a wild heathery plateau, even in my time haunted by eagles and regarded with awe. Despite his forebodings of danger from "Pookies" he got unmolested for half his journey to a hollow called the Granny Glen, a beautiful little lonely stream gully, as I saw it one