ing a shoe under a bramble hedge outside Blarney
Castle.

I was interrupted in these mythological reveries,
and was prevented from coming to my final
conclusion that more of the old Paganism remained
in Ireland than in any other European
country, by a tremendous split and crack of some
part of the car.

"Be asy," said Dennis. "You get on the
' crow's-nest' " (the little nook for the driver in
front of the car and between the two seats,
where no Irish driver, if he can help it, ever sits).
"I'll stand up by you, and it'll be all right. The
car's not so young as it was, but it's ——"

Here we gave a tremendous bump against a
roadside post.

"Bedad! not many a car 'ud stand that, and be
the better for it!"

Just then the rain began again—such rain!
grape-shot and razor-blades—as we tore on—
"slipping through it" Dennis called it—between
walls of mountains capped with cloud. For
more than an hour, head down, we butted through
this, our shirting yellow waterproofs glistening
like gold.

At last it cleared up, out came the laughing
blue. The bedrenched horse struck out
sprightlier than ever. Dennis began to sing,
and then to talk, and our talk fell on a certain
mountain we were passing, called The Giant
Mountain.

Now, Dennis was great in giants, being one of
an old family who had numbered many giants in
its ancestral roll.

"Did you ever hear of the giant who could
hear the grass growing?" said I.

"No," said Dennis, " he couldn't have been
a native of these parts. (Well, that's a good one,
too.) But I have seen a giant's grave there
away in Ennis, your honour. They say that he
had the biggest bones of any man in those parts,
but that his wife, falling in love with an ould
haythen King of Clare, with the big gold crown
on him, so that he looked like a walking jeweller's
shop, snigged off his head with his own sword,
for no other had any power over him. Many's
the time I've sat making salmon-flies on that
giant's gravestone. It Avasn't twenty years
ago that a party of the Green Horse came by
that way, and stopped there, at the very stone,
to water their horses. ' What's this?' says the
corporal to a countryman, who was digging
praties fornent it. 'It was the work of a big
Irish giant in the ould times,' says the countryman,
civilly. 'Well,' says the other, 'then it will be
the work of a young Scotch giant, in these times,
to remove it.' So he tries, and tugs, and tugs,
and gives it a terrible howge, but he couldn't
make anything of it. (Laughs.) Och! the
giant was too much for them—it's there now.

"I suppose," said I, "the banshee is seen
sometimes hereabouts."

"'Deed they are, your honour," said Dennis,
seriously; "we generally hear them in the
evening, or at twilight-fall, and we know that it
is no human voice keening, because it is so
sweet and mournful, like a sorrowing angel in
purgatory (rest their sowls!) for all the world,
your honour. The noise is just as if it was some
old woman was sittingdown under the wall yonder,
and beating her thighs at intervals with the flat
of her two hands, then flinging them up over
her head and clapping them together, as the
country keeners do when you hire them at a
funeral to chant out the Ologaun."

"She dresses, I have heard," I said, humour-
ing his belief, " in an old blue cloak, with her
long grey hair falling over her white staring face,
which is generally wan and famished. At Dunluce
Castle they showed me a round room at the base
of a tower overlooking the sea. It was once
the prison of the Earls of Antrim, and some
foul deed must have been done there in the
black old times. The earthen floor of this banshee's
tower is always kept clean and free from
dust, and people say it is swept daily by the
banshee."

"To think of that, now, your honour!" said
Dennis, with intense interest, feeling his faith
confirmed. " Well, a banshee was heard the
night my mother died, and it was in an old
Danish fort at the end of our praty ground;
when my poor mother, and she in her death-
struggles, heard that terrible wail that she knew
was not human, and she down in the fever, she
says to my father, says she, ' Dennis, I must go,'
and sure enough she died that day week, at
the very hour—and the same thing had happened
to all her family, for she was of a good ould
stock, your honour. A year or two after, what
did she do but appear to Teddy, one of my little
brothers. He come in one summer evening, and
told us that as he was playing about with the
yellow flowers that grow in the bog-holes,
making them into necklaces and belts and
what not, he feels a sort of warning, looks
up and sees mother sitting on the stile just as
she used to do, but very sad and pale. He
ran to her, but just as he got near her, she
melted away and disappeared. Then he got
frightened, which he wasn't before, and run
screaming home and tould us; and I remember
it more, by token it was St. Dennis's day, and he
is my patron saint, rest his sowl!"—crossing
himself five times.

"Did you ever see a cluricaun, Dennis?" said
I—" one of those little wizen fellows in red-heeled
shoes, scarlet coats, and laced cocked-hats, who is
seen hammering at a tiny brogue inside the ruins
of a chapel, and who, if you gripe him, tells you
where the crock of gold is?"

"No, your honour," said Dennis; " but I met
a fairy man once when I was a boy. It was up
a mountain, where I went to cut a stick, for it
was all shaking with hazel-nut bushes, and I
didn't care then for the story of the old folks
that it was slap full of fairies, and what not,
being a devil-me-care gossoon. I got up the
hill, scrambling through the stones and dry
fern, frightening rabbits, and startling thrushes,
treading the swate breath out of the dry purple
thyme, thinking of my girleen, as I always
did when I saw anything specially bright, sweet,
or in any wise purty; up I went and up, now