Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/115

Rh summer morning, in 1911, but weird and haunted in the gloom. He suddenly saw lights in every direction and could distinguish a great castle. He entered it and found large rooms lit by rainbow hues, as bright as the sun. A feast and rich plate were laid out in one and a crowd of servants and guests welcomed him to the table. He remembered that if he ate their food he should remain for seven years. So tempting seemed the food that he was about to yield when a woman stopped him, telling him she had flown from Donegal to save him. Then his host said, "I hope your friend O'Donnell liked his ramble the other night. Pray be so good as to present Capt. Green's compliments to Capt. and tell him he hopes to have the pleasure of his company before many nights shall have passed." The man on his return to Portacloy told everyone, and great excitement was felt as to what might befall Capt. ; the latter, when telling it to Otway, said that, if he had happened to be lost, all the natives would have believed that he was carried off by the fairies.

Near Ballycastle, in Tirawley Barony, eastward from Porta- cloy, is a "giant's grave" of unusual form—a vesica of large stones with a small circle at each point; near it lay another circle. The peasantry believed that "some big body belonging to Finn mac Coul " was laid there. Lieut. Henri, before 1838, heard how a weaver, who lived between it and Beldearg, had married a young and pretty girl. She sickened and died unaccountably, and, as her sorrowing husband sat alone, he heard her voice. She told him she had been carried off by the "gentry," but if he came at full moon to the giant's grave and drove out of it a brindled cow and her calf, she would be restored to him. He came, the cow lowed, and so horrible an uproar arose of cursing and hooting that he ran home, and his wife, who had been taken to nurse the fairy children, was never seen again, whether in her own form or that of the brindled cow.

Otway in A Tour in Connaught also notes beliefs among the people of Inishbofin which I found flourishing over seventy years later in that primitive place. It was firmly believed that the