every bone in his body if he did.  She never spoke to her sister again, because she had allowed herself to be beaten by so small a man.  Jim Montgomery grew worse and worse:  his wife soon began to have not enough to eat.  She told no one, for she was very proud.  Often, too, she would have no fire on a cold night.  If any neighbours came in she would say she had let the fire out because she was just going to bed.  The people about often heard her husband beating her, but she never told any one.  She got very thin.  At last one Saturday there was no food in the house for herself and the children.  She could bear it no longer, and went to the priest and asked him for some money.  He gave her thirty shillings.  Her husband met her, and took the money, and beat her.  On the following Monday she got very W, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly.  Mrs. Kelly, as soon as she saw her, said, “My woman, you are dying,” and sent for the priest and the doctor.  She died in an hour.  After her death, as Montgomery neglected the children, the landlord had them taken to the workhouse.  A few nights after they had gone, Mrs. Kelly was going home through the bogeen when the ghost of Mrs. Montgomery appeared and followed her.  It did not leave her until she reached her own house.  She told the priest, Father R, a noted antiquarian, and could not get him to believe her.  A few nights afterwards Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in the same place.  She was in too great terror to go the whole way, but stopped at a neighbour’s cottage midway, and asked them to let her in.  They answered they were going to bed.  She cried out, “In the name of God let me in, or I will break open the door.”  They opened, and so she escaped from the ghost.  Next day she told the priest again.  This time he believed, and said it would follow her until she spoke to it.

She met the spirit a third time in the bogeen.  She asked what kept it from its rest.  The spirit said that its children must be taken from the workhouse, for none of its relations were ever there before, and that three masses were to be said for the repose of its soul.  “If my husband does not believe you,” she said, “show him that,” and touched Mrs. Kelly’s wrist with three fingers.  The places where they touched swelled up and blackened.  She then vanished.  For a time Montgomery would not believe that his wife had appeared:  “she would not show herself to Mrs. Kelly,” he said—­“she with respectable people to appear to.”  He was convinced by the three marks, and the children were taken from the workhouse.  The priest said the masses, and the shade must have been at rest, for it has not since appeared.  Some time afterwards Jim Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty through drink.

I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon the quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, sees a woman with white borders to her cap[FN#2] creep out and follow him.  The apparition only leaves him at his own door.  The villagers imagine that she follows him to avenge some wrong.  “I will haunt you when I die” is a favourite threat.  His wife was once half-scared to death by what she considers a demon in the shape of a dog.