Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/130

118 telling of the haunted houses in southern Co. Galway. No old houses of the gentry lie along the shores of which I heard tales of haunting, nor (strange to say) did I, among the freely told stories of the supernatural, hear of any haunted house among the peasantry. Those who live in the districts may be able to correct my impression.

1 need not repeat any allusions to ghostly swans, cattle, dogs and horses, and (as I have said) all tales of the Puca regarded him as of human shape. I will, however, separate the folk-lore and stories of the supernatural animals from the ordinary lore of nature about plants and animals in the case of the seals.

On this wild coast with its shelving shores and endless reefs and skerries, it is natural that the seal (so familiar an object) should excite attention, and that, like all creatures that hover on the edge of two modes of life (like the bats, night birds and otters), it has gained a supernatural reputation.

Seals are accredited with human intelligence and more than human prescience. The MacConeely family claimed descent from a seal woman, and I have found this belief all down the coasts of Mayo, Galway and Co. Clare. Some fancy that seals were the people drowned in Noah's flood.

In 1839 Otway found that seal hunting had been stopped in N.E. Co. Mayo from Downpatrick Head to Kilcummin. Two boys had declared that, when killing seals in one of the caves of that reach of coast, a white seal sat up and cried, "Spare your old grandfather, Daniel O'Dowd"! They were naturally astonished, for O'Dowd had long before died and been buried in Dunfeeny (a venerable church with a lofty pillar in an earthwork and near a famous earthen rath of the O'Dowds famous