These two different ways of looking at things have influenced in each country the whole world of sprites and goblins.  For their gay and graceful doings you must go to Ireland; for their deeds of terror to Scotland.  Our Irish faery terrors have about them something of make-believe.  When a peasant strays into an enchanted hovel, and is made to turn a corpse all night on a spit before the fire, we do not feel anxious; we know he will wake in the midst of a green field, the dew on his old coat.  In Scotland it is altogether different.  You have soured the naturally excellent disposition of ghosts and goblins.  The piper M’Crimmon, of the Hebrides, shouldered his pipes, and marched into a sea cavern, playing loudly, and followed by his dog.  For a long time the people could hear the pipes.  He must have gone nearly a mile, when they heard the sound of a struggle.  Then the piping ceased suddenly.  Some time went by, and then his dog came out of the cavern completely flayed, too weak even to howl.  Nothing else ever came out of the cavern.  Then there is the tale of the man who dived into a lake where treasure was thought to be.  He saw a great coffer of iron.  Close to the coffer lay a monster, who warned him to return whence he came.  He rose to the surface; but the bystanders, when they heard he had seen the treasure, persuaded him to dive again.  He dived.  In a little while his heart and liver floated up, reddening the water.  No man ever saw the rest of his body.

These water-goblins and water-monsters are common in Scottish folk-lore.  We have them too, but take them much less dreadfully.  Our tales turn all their doings to favour and to prettiness, or hopelessly humorize the creatures.  A hole in the Sligo river is haunted by one of these monsters.  He is ardently believed in by many, but that does not prevent the peasantry playing with the subject, and surrounding it with conscious fantasies.  When I was a small boy I fished one day for congers in the monster hole.  Returning home, a great eel on my shoulder, his head flapping down in front, his tail sweeping the ground behind, I met a fisherman of my acquaintance.  I began a tale of an immense conger, three times larger than the one I carried, that had broken my line and escaped.  “That was him,” said the fisherman.  “Did you ever hear how he made my brother emigrate?  My brother was a diver, you know, and grubbed stones for the Harbour Board.  One day the beast comes up to him, and says, ‘What are you after?’ ‘Stones, sur,’ says he.  ‘Don’t you think you had better be going?’ ‘Yes, sur,’ says he.  And that’s why my brother emigrated.  The people said it was because he got poor, but that’s not true.”

You—­you will make no terms with the spirits of fire and earth and air and water.  You have made the Darkness your enemy.  We—­we exchange civilities with the world beyond.

WAR