1902.

ENCHANTED WOODS

I

Last summer, whenever I had finished my day’s work, I used to go wandering in certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an old countryman, and talk to him about his work and about the woods, and once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart more readily than to me, He had spent all his life lopping away the witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths, and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures of the wood.  He has heard the hedgehog—­“grainne oge,” he calls him—­ “grunting like a Christian,” and is certain that he steals apples by rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to every quill.  He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many in the woods, have a language of their own—­some kind of old Irish.  He says, “Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of some great change in the world.  That is why they are hard to kill, and why it is dangerous to meddle with them.  If you annoy a cat it might claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would be the serpent’s tooth.”  Sometimes he thinks they change into wild cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the woods.  The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away and became wild.  He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels—­whom he hates—­with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times his eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw under them.

I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and supernatural very clearly.  He told me the other day that foxes and cats like, above all, to be in the “forths” and lisses after nightfall; and he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about a marten cat—­a rare beast now-a-days.  Many years ago he used to work in the garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden-house where there was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear people rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft.  Once, at any rate, be has seen an unearthly sight in the woods.  He says, “One time I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight o’clock one morning when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good, clean face, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no way gaudy but simple, and when she felt me coming she gathered herself up and was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up.  And I followed her and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to this, never again.”  He used the word clean as we would use words like fresh or comely.