When we were tired talking I showed some of my tricks and a little crowd collected.  When they were gone another old man who had come up began telling us about the fairies.  One night when he was coming home from the lighthouse he heard a man riding on the road behind him, and he stopped to wait for him, but nothing came.  Then he heard as if there was a man trying to catch a horse on the rocks, and in a little time he went on.  The noise behind him got bigger as he went along as if twenty horses, and then as if a hundred or a thousand, were galloping after him.  When he came to the stile where he had to leave the road and got out over it, something hit against him and threw him down on the rock, and a gun he had in his hand fell into the field beyond him.

‘I asked the priest we had at that time what was in it,’ he said, ’and the priest told me it was the fallen angels; and I don’t know but it was.’

‘Another time,’ he went on, ’I was coming down where there is a bit of a cliff and a little hole under it, and I heard a flute playing in the hole or beside it, and that was before the dawn began.  Whatever anyone says there are strange things.  There was one night thirty years ago a man came down to get my wife to go up to his wife, for she was in childbed.

’He was something to do with the lighthouse or the coastguard, one of them Protestants who don’t believe in any of these things and do be making fun of us.  Well, he asked me to go down and get a quart of spirits while my wife would be getting herself ready, and he said he would go down along with me if I was afraid.

’I said I was not afraid, and I went by myself.

’When I was coming back there was something on the path, and wasn’t I a foolish fellow, I might have gone to one side or the other over the sand, but I went on straight till I was near it—­till I was too near it—­then I remembered that I had heard them saying none of those creatures can stand before you and you saying the De Profundis, so I began saying it, and the thing ran off over the sand and I got home.

’Some of the people used to say it was only an old jackass that was on the path before me, but I never heard tell of an old jackass would run away from a man and he saying the De Profundis.’

I told him the story of the fairy ship which had disappeared when the man made the sign of the cross, as I had heard it on the middle island.

‘There do be strange things on the sea,’ he said.  ’One night I was down there where you can see that green point, and I saw a ship coming in and I wondered what it would be doing coming so close to the rocks.  It came straight on towards the place I was in, and then I got frightened and I ran up to the houses, and when the captain saw me running he changed his course and went away.