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