"Mrs. Mac Carthy, on recovering, fell into the arms of my mother,
whose presence seemed a great relief to her. She wept--the first
tears, I was told, that she had shed since the fatal accident. She
conducted us to Charles's room, who, she said, had desired to see us
the moment of our arrival, as he found his end approaching, and wished
to devote the last hours of his existence to uninterrupted prayer and
meditation. We found him perfectly calm, resigned, and even cheerful.
He spoke of the awful event which was at hand with courage and
confidence, and treated it as a doom for which he had been preparing
ever since his former remarkable illness, and which he never once
doubted was truly foretold to him. He bade us farewell with the air of
one who was about to travel a short and easy journey; and we left him
with impressions which, notwithstanding all their anguish, will, I
trust, never entirely forsake us.
"Poor Mrs. Mac Carthy----but I am just called away. There seems a
slight stir in the family; perhaps----"
The above letter was never finished. The enclosure to which it more
than once alludes told the sequel briefly, and it is all that I have
further learned of the family of Mac Carthy. Before the sun had gone
down upon Charles's seven-and-twentieth birthday, his soul had gone to
render its last account to its Creator.
GHOSTS.
Ghosts, or as they are called in Irish, _Thevshi_ or _Tash_
(_taidhbhse_, _tais_), live in a state intermediary between this life
and the next. They are held there by some earthly longing or affection,
or some duty unfulfilled, or anger against the living. "I will haunt
you," is a common threat; and one hears such phrases as, "She will haunt
him, if she has any good in her." If one is sorrowing greatly after a
dead friend, a neighbour will say, "Be quiet now, you are keeping him
from his rest;" or, in the Western Isles, according to Lady Wilde, they
will tell you, "You are waking the dog that watches to devour the souls
of the dead." Those who die suddenly, more commonly than others, are
believed to become haunting Ghosts. They go about moving the furniture,
and in every way trying to attract attention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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