OLE AND ST. KEVIN _Samuel Lover_ 314

LAMENT OF THE LAST LEPRECHAUN _Nora Hopper_ 322

THE CORPSE WATCHERS _Patrick Kennedy_ 324

THE MAD PUDDING _William Carleton_ 329

THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE _Alfred Tennyson_ 346

Preface

Irish Fairy Lore has well been called by Mr. Alfred Nutt, one of the
leading authorities on the subject, "As fair and bounteous a harvest of
myth and romance as ever flourished among any race," and Dr. Joyce, the
well-known Irish scholar and historian, states: "that it is very
probable that the belief in the existence of fairies came in with the
earliest colonists that entered Ireland, and that this belief is
recorded in the oldest of native Irish writings in a way that proves it
to have been, at the time treated of, long established and universally
received."

Colgan himself supplies us with the name and derivation of the Irish
word for fairy, Sidh (shee), still used throughout the country.
"Fantastical spirits," he writes, "are by the Irish called men of the
Sidh, because they are seen, as it were, to come out of the beautiful
hills to infest men, and hence the vulgar belief that they reside in
certain subterranean habitations; and sometimes the hills themselves are
called by the Irish Sidhe or Siodha."

In Colgan's time, then, the fairy superstition had passed from the upper
classes, gradually disenthralled of it by the influence of Christianity
to the common people, among whom it is still rife. But it is clear that
in the time of St. Patrick a belief in a world of fairies existed even
in the King's household, for it is recorded that "when the two daughters
of King Leary of Ireland, Ethnea the fair and Fedelma the ruddy, came
early one morning to the well of Clebach to wash, they found there a
synod of holy bishops with Patrick. And they knew not whence they came,
or in what form, or from what people, or from what country; but they
supposed them to be Duine Sidh, or gods of the earth, or a phantasm."

As suggested, the belief of the Princesses obtains to this very day
amongst the peasantry of remote districts in Ireland, who still maintain
that the fairies inhabit the Sidhe, or hills, and record instances of
relations and friends being transported into their underground palaces.

The truth is that the Gaelic peasant, Scotch and Irish, is a mystic, and
believ