the nightcapped “doctors” will peer with more than common care, for the unearthly troop do not always return empty-handed.  Sometimes a new-wed bride or a new-born baby goes with them into their mountains; the door swings to behind, and the new-born or the new-wed moves henceforth in the bloodless land of Faery; happy enough, but doomed to melt out at the last judgment like bright vapour, for the soul cannot live without sorrow.  Through this door of white stone, and the other doors of that land where geabheadh tu an sonas aer pighin ("you can buy joy for a penny"), have gone kings, queens, and princes, but so greatly has the power of Faery dwindled, that there are none but peasants in these sad chronicles of mine.

Somewhere about the beginning of last century appeared at the western corner of Market Street, Sligo, where the butcher’s shop now is, not a palace, as in Keats’s Lamia, but an apothecary’s shop, ruled over by a certain unaccountable Dr. Opendon.  Where he came from, none ever knew.  There also was in Sligo, in those days, a woman, Ormsby by name, whose husband had fallen mysteriously sick.  The doctors could make nothing of him.  Nothing seemed wrong with him, yet weaker and weaker he grew.  Away went the wife to Dr. Opendon.  She was shown into the shop parlour.  A black cat was sitting straight up before the fire.  She had just time to see that the side-board was covered with fruit, and to say to herself, “Fruit must be wholesome when the doctor has so much,” before Dr. Opendon came in.  He was dressed all in black, the same as the cat, and his wife walked behind him dressed in black likewise.  She gave him a guinea, and got a little bottle in return.  Her husband recovered that time.  Meanwhile the black doctor cured many people; but one day a rich patient died, and cat, wife, and doctor all vanished the night after.  In a year the man Ormsby fell sick once more.  Now he was a goodlooking man, and his wife felt sure the “gentry” were coveting him.  She went and called on the “faery-doctor” at Cairnsfoot.  As soon as he had heard her tale, he went behind the back door and began muttering, muttering, muttering-making spells.  Her husband got well this time also.  But after a while he sickened again, the fatal third time, and away went she once more to Cairnsfoot, and out went the faery-doctor behind his back door and began muttering, but soon he came in and told her it was no use—­ her husband would die; and sure enough the man died, and ever after when she spoke of him Mrs. Ormsby shook her head saying she knew well where he was, and it wasn’t in heaven or hell or purgatory either.  She probably believed that a log of wood was left behind in his place, but so bewitched that it seemed the dead body of her husband.

She is dead now herself, but many still living remember her.  She was, I believe, for a time a servant or else a kind of pensioner of some relations of my own.