[FN#2] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap.  The old Mayo woman, who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw “a woman with white borders to her cap going around the stacks in a field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months.”

These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.

One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy’s Lane.  Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door.  She did not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked.  The knocking ceased.  After a little the front-door and then the back-door were burst open, and closed again.  Her husband went to see what was wrong.  He found both doors bolted.  The child died.  The doors were again opened and closed as before.  Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that she had forgotten to leave window or door open, as the custom is, for the departure of the soul.  These strange openings and closings and knockings were warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the dying.

The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature.  It is put up with as long as possible.  It brings good luck to those who live with it.  I remember two children who slept with their mother and sisters and brothers in one small room.  In the room was also a ghost.  They sold herrings in the Dublin streets, and did not mind the ghost much, because they knew they would always sell their fish easily while they slept in the “ha’nted” room.

I have some acquaintance among the ghost-seers of western villages.  The Connaught tales are very different from those of Leinster.  These H----- spirits have a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them.  They come to announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong, to pay their bills even—­as did a fisherman’s daughter the other day—­and then hasten to their rest.  All things they do decently and in order.  It is demons, and not ghosts, that transform themselves into white cats or black dogs.  The people who tell the tales are poor, serious-minded fishing people, who find in the doings of the ghosts the fascination of fear.  In the western tales is a whimsical grace, a curious extravagance.  The people who recount them live in the most wild and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with flying clouds.  They are farmers and labourers, who do a little fishing now and then.  They do not fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic and humorous pleasure in their doings.  The ghosts themselves share in their quaint hilarity.  In one western town, on whose deserted wharf the grass grows, these spirits have so much vigour that, when a misbeliever ventured to sleep in a haunted house, I have been told they flung him through the window, and his bed after him.  In the surrounding villages the creatures use the most strange disguises.  A dead old gentleman robs the cabbages of his own garden in the shape of a large rabbit.  A wicked sea-captain stayed for years inside the plaster of a cottage wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises.  He was only dislodged when the wall was broken down; then out of the solid plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.