In Galway there is a deep depression in the limestone called “Pigeon Hole,” and the sacred rivulet running at the base of the chasm is believed to contain a pair of enchanted trout, one of which is said to have been captured some time ago by a trooper and cooked, but upon the approach of cold steel “the creature at once changed into a beautiful woman,” and was returned to the stream. The well at Tullaghan, County Sligo, also harbours a brace of miraculous trout, not always visible to ordinary eyes. Similarly, at Bally Morereigh, in Dingle, County Kerry, is a sacred well called Tober Monachan, where a salmon and eel appear to those devotees whom the guardian spirits of the well wish to favour. In Scotland at Kilbride in Skye was a well with one trout. “The natives are very tender of it,” says Martin, “and though they often chance to catch it in their wooden pails, they are very careful to preserve it from being destroyed.” In the well at Kilmore, in Lorn, were two fishes, black in colour, never augmenting in size or number nor exhibiting any alteration of colour, and the inhabitants of the place “doe call the saide fishes Easg Saint, that is to say, holie fishes.” Sir Laurence Gomme records other examples of a still more interesting nature. If, says Dalyell, a certain worm in a medicinal spring on the top of the hill in the parish of Strathdon were found alive, it augured the recovery of a patient, and in a well of Ardnacloich, in Appin, the patient, “if he bee to dye shall find a dead worme therein or a quick one, if health bee to follow.” These, there can be little doubt, are the former deities of the spring thus reduced in status. Mention has already been made of the presiding genius of the well of St. Michael near the Church of Kirkmichael, in Banffshire, who assumes the semblance of a fly, and who is immortal and always present in the water. “To the eye of ignorance,” says the local account, “he might sometimes appear dead, but it was only a transmigration into a similar form, which made little alteration to the real identity.” “It seems impossible,” remarks Sir Laurence Gomme, “to mistake this as an almost perfect example where the guardian deity of the sacred spring is represented in animal form. More perfect than any other example to be met with in Britain and its isles is this singular description of the traditional peasant belief, it lifts the whole evidence as to the identification of wells in Britain as the shrine of ancient local deities into close parallel with savage ideas and thought.” Professor Robertson Smith points out that the divine life of the waters is believed to reside in the sacred fish that inhabits them, and he gives numerous examples analogous to the Scottish and Irish, but whether represented by fish, or frog, or worm, or fly, in all their various forms, the point of the legends is that the sacred source is either inhabited by a demoniac being or imbued with demoniac life.