“Why!  Why is he called Harry na Suil Balor for?  Can you tell me that?”

“Why, bekaise his two eyes isn’t one color.”

“And why aren’t they one color?  Can you tell me that?”

“O, the sorra step farther I can go in that question.”

“No,” said Barney, full of importance, “I thought not, and what is more, I didn’t expect it from you.  His mother could tell, though.  It’s in her family, and there’s worse than that in her family.”

“Troth, by all accounts,” observed the girl, “there never was anything good in her family.  But, Barney, achora, will you tell us, if you know, what’s the rason of it?”

“If I know?” said Barney, rather offended; “maybe I don’t know, and maybe I do, if it came to that.  Any body, then, that has two eyes of different colors always has the Evil Eye, or the Suil Balor, and has the power of overlookin’; and, between ourselves, Masther Harry has it.  The misthress herself can only overlook cattle, bekaise both her eyes is of the one color; but Masther Harry could overlook either man or woman if he wished.  And how do you think that comes?”

“The Lord knows,” replied the cook, crossing herself; “from no good, at any rate.  Troth, I’ll get a gospel and a scapular, for, to tell you the truth, I observed that Masther Harry gave me a look the other day that made my flesh creep, by rason that he thought the mutton was overdone.”

“O, you needn’t be afeard,” replied Barney; “he can overlook or not, as he plaises; if he does not wish to do so, you’re safe enough; but when any one like him that has the power wishes to do it, they could wither you by degrees off o’ the airth.”

“God be about us!  But, Barney, you didn’t tell us how it comes, for all that.”

“It comes from the fairies.  Doesn’t every one know that the fairies themselves has the power of overlookin’ both cattle and Christians?”

“That’s true enough,” she replied; “every one, indeed, knows that.  Sure, my aunt had a child that died o’ the fairies.”

“Yes, but Masther Harry can see them.”

“What! is it the fairies?”

“Ay, the fairies, but only wid one eye, that piercin’ black one of his.  No, no; as I said before, he may walk where he likes, both by night and by day; he’s safe from everything of the kind; even a ghost daren’t lay a finger on him; and as the devil and the fairies are connected, he’s safe from him, too, in this world at laste; but the Lord pity him when he goes to the next; for there he’ll suffer lalty.”

The truth is, that in those days of witchcraft and apparitions of all kinds, and even in the present, among the ignorant and uneducated of the lower classes, any female seen at night in a lonely place, and supposed to be a spirit, was termed a white woman, no matter what the color of her dress may have been, provided it was not black.  The same superstition held good when anything in the shape of a man happened to appear under similar circumstances.  Terror, and the force of an excited imagination, instantly transformed it into a black man, and that black man, of course, was the devil himself.  In the case before us, however, our readers, we have no doubt, can give a better guess at the nature of the black man and white woman in question than either the cook, the housemaid, or even Barney himself.