said the child; “would you have her going about yonder with her petticoat up to her knees, and she dead but four days?” I have read a story of a woman whose ghost haunted her people because they had made her grave-clothes so short that the fires of purgatory burned her knees.  The peasantry expect to have beyond the grave houses much like their earthly homes, only there the thatch will never grow leaky, nor the white walls lose their lustre, nor shall the dairy be at any time empty of good milk and butter.  But now and then a landlord or an agent or a gauger will go by begging his bread, to show how God divides the righteous from the unrighteous.

1892 and 1902.

THE EATERS OF PRECIOUS STONES

Sometimes when I have been shut off from common interests, and have for a little forgotten to be restless, I get waking dreams, now faint and shadow-like, now vivid and solid-looking, like the material world under my feet.  Whether they be faint or vivid, they are ever beyond the power of my will to alter in any way.  They have their own will, and sweep hither and thither, and change according to its commands.  One day I saw faintly an immense pit of blackness, round which went a circular parapet, and on this parapet sat innumerable apes eating precious stones out of the palms of their hands.  The stones glittered green and crimson, and the apes devoured them with an insatiable hunger.  I knew that I saw the Celtic Hell, and my own Hell, the Hell of the artist, and that all who sought after beautiful and wonderful things with too avid a thirst, lost peace and form and became shapeless and common.  I have seen into other people’s hells also, and saw in one an infernal Peter, who had a black face and white lips, and who weighed on a curious double scales not only the evil deeds committed, but the good deeds left undone, of certain invisible shades.  I could see the scales go up and down, but I could not see the shades who were, I knew, crowding about him.  I saw on another occasion a quantity of demons of all kinds of shapes—­fish-like, serpent-like, ape-like, and dog-like —­sitting about a black pit such as that in my own Hell, and looking at a moon—­like reflection of the Heavens which shone up from the depths of the pit.

OUR LADY OF THE HILLS

When we were children we did not say at such a distance from the post-office, or so far from the butcher’s or the grocer’s, but measured things by the covered well in the wood, or by the burrow of the fox in the hill.  We belonged then to God and to His works, and to things come down from the ancient days.  We would not have been greatly surprised had we met the shining feet of an angel among the white mushrooms upon the mountains, for we knew in those days immense despair, unfathomed love—­every eternal mood,—­but now the draw-net is about our feet.  A few miles eastward of Lough Gill, a young