Of the enormous number of harvestmen who passed every year through Liverpool, except from the County Donegal, there were not so many from the northern province.  The majority were from Connaught.  They generally landed at the Clarence Dock, Liverpool, a wiry, hardy-looking lot, with frieze coats, corduroy breeches, clean white shirts with high collars, and blackthorn sticks.  I have seen them filling the breadth of Prescot Street, as they left the town, marching up like an army on foot to the various parts of England they were bound for.  This was before special cheap trains were run for harvestmen.

At night, in my Irish mountain home, after I had prepared my Latin lessons for the following day, and my uncle, aunt, and cousins had left off work, I joined with great enjoyment in the family group around the turf fire, and listened with rapt attention to songs and stories; my favourite among the latter being the adventures of Barney Henvey among the fairies in the old rath, or “forth,” as they called it, of Ballymagenaghy.

I may say that, up to this moment, I have a certain liking for such stories—­of course as fairy stories.  But, being a boy of enquiring mind, I wanted to get at the whole theory of the existence of these beings, and, accordingly, this is what I gathered as to the origin, present existence, and future state of the “good people,” as they called them.  In “The Irish Fairy Legends,” a number of my “Penny Irish Library,” I find I have dealt with the subject.  As the passage gives the explanation I got at my uncle Oiney’s more correctly than I can trust to my memory to give it now, after a lapse of some sixty years, I may be excused for giving the following extract:—­

The belief is that, in the great rebellion of Lucifer, of the spirits who fell from heaven, some, not so guilty as those who “went further and fared worse,” fell upon our earth, and into the air and water that surround it.  These are the Fairies, who have their various dispositions, like mortals, and like them, at the day of judgment, will be rewarded or punished according to their deserts.

In the “Fairy Legends” I have also given the story of “Barney Henvey” mentioned above.  There is something like it in the “Ingoldsby Legends,” and, no doubt, in the fairy mythologies of other nations, but my story is of Irish origin.  Heaven only knows through how many ages it has been handed down to us.  It is one of the fairy stories my mother and grandmother used to tell us as long ago as I can remember.  I have a little grandson who, when smaller, used sometimes to insist when put to bed after he had said his “lying-down prayers,” upon hearing “Barney Henvey” before he went to sleep; and so it will, no doubt, go on, and such stories may be told in ages to come, not only in Ireland—­“A Nation once again”—­but in every settlement of the Clan-na-Gael throughout the world.

Friends and neighbours would come to my uncle Oiney’s from beside Castlewellan Lough, and over from Dolly’s Brae and Ballymagrehan, who, after the day’s work, enjoyed going “a cailey.”  I hope my Gaelic League friends will forgive me if I don’t give the correct sound of this word, but that is my remembrance of how they pronounced it some sixty years ago in the County Down.