The Celtic Twilight | Page 2

that he ever
recommended mirth and hopefulness. He was fond, for instance, of
telling how Collumcille cheered up his mother. "How are you to-day,
mother?" said the saint. "Worse," replied the mother. "May you be
worse to-morrow," said the saint. The next day Collumcille came again,
and exactly the same conversation took place, but the third day the
mother said, "Better, thank God." And the saint replied, "May you be
better to-morrow." He was fond too of telling how the Judge smiles at

the last day alike when he rewards the good and condemns the lost to
unceasing flames. He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or
to make him sad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the
reply, "Am I not annoyed with them?" I asked too if he had ever seen
the banshee. "I have seen it," he said, "down there by the water, batting
the river with its hands."
I have copied this account of Paddy Flynn, with a few verbal alterations,
from a note-book which I almost filled with his tales and sayings,
shortly after seeing him. I look now at the note-book regretfully, for the
blank pages at the end will never be filled up. Paddy Flynn is dead; a
friend of mine gave him a large bottle of whiskey, and though a sober
man at most times, the sight of so much liquor filled him with a great
enthusiasm, and he lived upon it for some days and then died. His body,
worn out with old age and hard times, could not bear the drink as in his
young days. He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common
romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland
and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but
knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps
the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient
simplicity and amplitude of imagination. What is literature but the
expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are
there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for
their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not
moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to
mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the
heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into
the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize
whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists,
everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
BELIEF AND UNBELIEF
There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told
me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts.
Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep
people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go

"trapsin about the earth" at their own free will; "but there are faeries,"
she added, "and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels."
I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooed upon his arm,
who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter what one
doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the mohawk
Indian on his arm said to me, "they stand to reason." Even the official
mind does not escape this faith.
A little girl who was at service in the village of Grange, close under the
seaward slopes of Ben Bulben, suddenly disappeared one night about
three years ago. There was at once great excitement in the

neighbourhood, because it was rumoured that the faeries had taken her.
A villager was said to have long struggled to hold her from them, but at
last they prevailed, and he found nothing in his hands but a broomstick.
The local constable was applied to, and he at once instituted a
house-to-house search, and at the same time advised the people to burn
all the bucalauns (ragweed) on the field she vanished from, because
bucalauns are sacred to the faeries. They spent the whole night burning
them, the constable repeating spells the while. In the morning the little
girl was found, the story goes, wandering in the field. She said the
faeries had taken her away a great distance, riding on a faery horse. At
last she saw a big river, and the man who had tried to keep her from
being carried off was drifting down it--such are the topsy-turvydoms of
faery glamour--in a cockleshell. On the way her companions had
mentioned the names of several people who were about to die