‘There are people who say they don’t believe in these things,’ said the old woman, ’but there are strange things, let them say what they will.  There was a woman went to bed at the lower village a while ago, and her child along with her.  For a time they did not sleep, and then something came to the window, and they heard a voice and this is what it said—­

’"It is time to sleep from this out.”

’In the morning the child was dead, and indeed it is many get their death that way on the island.’

The young man has been buried, and his funeral was one of the strangest scenes I have met with.  People could be seen going down to his house from early in the day, yet when I went there with the old man about the middle of the afternoon, the coffin was still lying in front of the door, with the men and women of the family standing round beating it, and keening over it, in a great crowd of people.  A little later every one knelt down and a last prayer was said.  Then the cousins of the dead man got ready two oars and some pieces of rope—­the men of his own family seemed too broken with grief to know what they were doing—­the coffin was tied up, and the procession began.  The old woman walked close behind the coffin, and I happened to take a place just after them, among the first of the men.  The rough lane to the graveyard slopes away towards the east, and the crowd of women going down before me in their red dresses, cloaked with red pethcoats, with the waistband that is held round the head just seen from behind, had a strange effect, to which the white coffin and the unity of colour gave a nearly cloistral quietness.

This time the graveyard was filled with withered grass and bracken instead of the early ferns that were to be seen everywhere at the other funeral I have spoken of, and the grief of the people was of a different kind, as they had come to bury a young man who had died in his first manhood, instead of an old woman of eighty.  For this reason the keen lost a part of its formal nature, and was recited as the expression of intense personal grief by the young men and women of the man’s own family.

When the coffin had been laid down, near the grave that was to be opened, two long switches were cut out from the brambles among the rocks, and the length and breadth of the coffin were marked on them.  Then the men began their work, clearing off stones and thin layers of earth, and breaking up an old coffin that was in the place into which the new one had to be lowered.  When a number of blackened boards and pieces of bone had been thrown up with the clay, a skull was lifted out, and placed upon a gravestone.  Immediately the old woman, the mother of the dead man, took it up in her hands, and carried it away by herself.  Then she sat down and put it in her lap—­it was the skull of her own mother—­and began keening and shrieking over it with the wildest lamentation.