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 “Faeries Path.”  Every evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill.  At the sea end of their path stands a cottage.  One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son.  Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him.  After he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, “In the name of God, who are you?” He got up and went out, saying, “Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.”  She woke her husband and told him.  “One of the good people has been with us,” said he.

Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart at Hillside Gate.  When she lived she was the wife of the Protestant clergyman.  “Her ghost was never known to harm any one,” say the village people; “it is only doing a penance upon the earth.”  Not far from Hillside Gate, where she haunted, appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit.  Its haunt was the bogeen, a green lane leading from the western end of the village.  I quote its history at length:  a typical village tragedy.  In a cottage at the village end of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim Montgomery, and his wife.  They had several children.  He was a little dandy, and came of a higher class than his neighbours.  His wife was a very big woman.  Her husband, who had been expelled from the village choir for drink, gave her a beating one day.  Her sister heard of it, and came and took down one of the window shutters—­Montgomery was neat about everything, and had shutters on the outside of every window—­and beat him with it, being big and strong like her sister.  He threatened to prosecute her; she answered that she would break