Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John Kirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[H] are a family much rumoured of in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and a spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read that the mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe. John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpool with a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. That evening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and asked where he was stabling his horse. In such and such a place, he answered. ‘Don’t put him there,’ said the slip of a boy; ‘that stable will be burnt to-night.’ He took his horse elsewhere, and sure enough the stable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as reward to ride as his jockey in the coming race, and then was gone. The race-time came round. At the last moment the boy ran forward and mounted, saying, ‘If I strike him with the whip in my left hand I will lose, but if in my right hand bet all you are worth.’ ‘For,’ said Paddy Flynn, who told me the tale, ‘the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on making the sign of the cross with it, and all that, come Christmas, and a banshee, or such like, would no more mind than if it was that broom.’ Well, the slip of a boy struck the horse with his right hand, and John Kirwan cleared the field out. When the race was over, ‘What can I do for you now?’ said he. ‘Nothing but this,’ said the boy: ‘my mother has a cottage on your land—they stole me from the cradle. Be good to her, John Kirwan, and wherever your horses go I will watch that no ill follows them; but you will never see me more.’ With that he made himself air, and vanished.