us than is the old horse peering
through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers
wrote across unexplored regions, "Here are lions." Across the villages
of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us,
we can write but one line that is certain, "Here are ghosts."

My ghosts inhabit the village of H-----, in Leinster. History has in
no manner been burdened by this ancient village, with its crooked
lanes, its old abbey churchyard full of long grass, its green
background of small fir-trees, and its quay, where lie a few tarry
fishing-luggers. In the annals of entomology it is well known. For a
small bay lies westward a little, where he who watches night after
night may see a certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of the
tide, just at the end of evening or the beginning of dawn. A hundred
years ago it was carried here from Italy by smugglers in a cargo of
silks and laces. If the moth-hunter would throw down his net, and go
hunting for ghost tales or tales of the faeries and such-like children
of Lillith, he would have need for far less patience.

To approach the village at night a timid man requires great strategy.
A man was once heard complaining, "By the cross of Jesus! how shall I
go? If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out on
me. If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is the
headless one and another on the quays, and a new one under the old
churchyard wall. If I go right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart is
appearing at Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in the Hospital
Lane."

I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not the one
in the Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up to
receive patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down, but
ever since the ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts and
demons and faeries. There is a farmer at H-----, Paddy B----- by name-a
man of great strength, and a teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law,
musing on his great strength, often wonder what he would do if he
drank. One night when passing through the Hospital Lane, he saw what he
supposed at first to be a tame rabbit; after a little he found that it
was a white cat. When he came near, the creature slowly began to swell
larger and larger, and as it grew he felt his own strength ebbing away,
as though it were sucked out of him. He turned and ran.

By the Hospital Lane goes the "Faeri