The Kenealy Banshee furnishes yet another instance of this extremely fascinating and, up to the present, wholly enigmatical type of haunting. Dr Kenealy, the well-known Irish poet and author, resided in his earlier years in a wildly romantic and picturesque part of Ireland. Among his brothers was one, a mere child, whose sweet and gentle nature rendered him beloved by all, and it was a matter of the most excessive grief to the entire household, and, indeed, the whole neighbourhood, when this boy fell into a decline and his life was despaired of by the physicians. As time went on he grew weaker and weaker, until the moment at length arrived, when it was obvious that he could not possibly survive another twenty-four hours. At about noon, the room in which the patient lay was flooded with a stream of sunlight, which came pouring through the windows from the cloudless expanse of sky overhead. The weather, indeed, was so gorgeous that it seemed almost incredible that death could be hovering quite so near the house. One by one, members of the family stole into the chamber to take what each one felt might be a last look at the sick boy, whilst he was still alive. Presently the doctor arrived, and, as they were all discussing in hushed tones the condition of the poor wasted and doomed child, they one and all heard someone singing, apparently in the grounds, immediately beneath the window. The voice seemed to be that of a woman, but not a woman of this world. It was divinely soft and sweet, and charged with a pity and sorrow that no earthly being could ever have portrayed; and now loud, and now hushed, it continued for some minutes, and then seemed to die away gradually, like the ripple of a wavelet on some golden, sun-kissed strand, or the whispering of the wind, as it gently rustles its way through field after field of yellow, nodding corn. "What a glorious voice!" one of the listeners exclaimed. "I've never heard anything to equal it." "Very likely not," someone else whispered, "it's the Banshee!" And so enthralled were they all by the singing, that it was only when the final note of the plaintive ditty had quite ceased, that they became aware that their beloved patient, unnoticed by them, had passed out. Indeed, it seemed as if the boy's soul, with the last whispering notes of the dirge, had joined the beautiful, pitying Banshee, to be escorted by it into the realms of the all-fearful, all-impatient Unknown. Dr Kenealy has commemorated this event in one of his poems. The story of another haunting by the friendly Banshee is told in Kerry, in connection with a certain family that used to live there. According to my source of information the family consisted of a man (a gentleman farmer), his wife, their son, Terence, and a daughter, Norah.