These water-goblins and water-monsters are common in Scottish folk-lore. We have them too, but take them much less dreadfully. Our tales turn all their doings to favour and to prettiness, or hopelessly humorize the creatures. A hole in the Sligo river is haunted by one of these monsters. He is ardently believed in by many, but that does not prevent the peasantry playing with the subject, and surrounding it with conscious phantasies. When I was a small boy I fished one day for congers in the monster hole. Returning home, a great eel on my shoulder, his head flapping down in front, his tail sweeping the ground behind, I met a fisherman of my acquaintance. I began a tale of an immense conger, three times larger than the one I carried, that had broken my line and escaped. ‘That was him,’ said the fisherman. ‘Did you ever hear how he made my brother emigrate? My brother was a diver, you know, and grubbed stones for the Harbour Board. One day the beast comes up to him, and says, “What are you after?” “Stones, sur,” says he. “Don’t you think you had better be going?” “Yes, sur,” says he. And that’s why my brother emigrated. The people said it was because he got poor, but that’s not true.’ You—you will make no terms with the spirits of fire and earth and air and water. You have made the Darkness your enemy. We—we exchange civilities with the world beyond. WAR WHEN there was a rumour of war with France a while ago, I met a poor Sligo woman, a soldier’s widow, that I know, and I read her a sentence out of a letter I had just had from London: ‘The people here are mad for war, but France seems inclined to take things peacefully,’ or some like sentence. Her mind ran a good deal on war, which she imagined partly from what she had heard from soldiers, and partly from tradition of the rebellion of ’98, but the word London doubled her interest, for she knew there were a great many people in London, and she herself had once lived in ‘a congested district.’ ‘There are too many over one another in London. They are getting tired of the world. It is killed they want to be. It will be no matter; but sure the French want nothing but peace and quietness. The people here don’t mind the war coming. They could not be worse than they are. They may as well die soldierly before God. Sure they will get quarters in heaven.’ Then she began to say that it would be a hard thing to see children tossed about on bayonets, and I knew her mind was running on traditions of the great rebellion. She said presently, ‘I never knew a man that was in a battle that liked to speak of it after. They’d sooner be throwing hay down from a hayrick.’ She told me how she and her neighbours used to be sitting over the fire when she was a girl, talking of the war that was coming, and now she was afraid it was coming again, for she had dreamed that all the bay was ‘stranded and covered with seaweed.’ I asked her if it was in the Fenian times that she had been so much afraid of war coming.