I said to the more powerful of the two sorcerers—­“What would happen if one of your spirits had overpowered me?” “You would go out of this room,” he answered, “with his character added to your own.”  I asked about the origin of his sorcery, but got little of importance, except that he had learned it from his father.  He would not tell me more, for he had, it appeared, taken a vow of secrecy.

For some days I could not get over the feeling of having a number of deformed and grotesque figures lingering about me.  The Bright Powers are always beautiful and desirable, and the Dim Powers are now beautiful, now quaintly grotesque, but the Dark Powers express their unbalanced natures in shapes of ugliness and horror.

THE DEVIL

My old Mayo woman told me one day that something very bad had come down the road and gone into the house opposite, and though she would not say what it was, I knew quite well.  Another day she told me of two friends of hers who had been made love to by one whom they believed to be the devil.  One of them was standing by the road-side when he came by on horseback, and asked her to mount up behind him, and go riding.  When she would not he vanished.  The other was out on the road late at night waiting for her young man, when something came flapping and rolling along the road up to her feet.  It had the likeness of a newspaper, and presently it flapped up into her face, and she knew by the size of it that it was the Irish Times.  All of a sudden it changed into a young man, who asked her to go walking with him.  She would not, and he vanished.

I know of an old man too, on the slopes of Ben Bulben, who found the devil ringing a bell under his bed, and he went off and stole the chapel bell and rang him out.  It may be that this, like the others, was not the devil at all, but some poor wood spirit whose cloven feet had got him into trouble.

HAPPY AND UNHAPPY THEOLOGIANS

I

A mayo woman once said to me, “I knew a servant girl who hung herself for the love of God.  She was lonely for the priest and her society,[FN#5] and hung herself to the banisters with a scarf.  She was no sooner dead than she became white as a lily, and if it had been murder or suicide she would have become black as black.  They gave her Christian burial, and the priest said she was no sooner dead than she was with the Lord.  So nothing matters that you do for the love of God.”  I do not wonder at the pleasure she has in telling this story, for she herself loves all holy things with an ardour that brings them quickly to her lips.  She told me once that she never hears anything described in a sermon that she does not afterwards see with her eyes.  She has described to me the gates of Purgatory as they showed themselves to her eyes, but I remember