_Nature of the Belief in Fairies._--'As children we were always afraid of fairies, and were taught to say "God bless _them_! God bless _them_!" whenever we heard them mentioned. 'In our family we always made it a point to have clean water in the house at night for the fairies. 'If anything like dirty water was thrown out of doors after dark it was necessary to say "_Hugga, hugga salach!_" as a warning to the fairies not to get their clothes wet. 'Untasted food, like milk, used to be left on the table at night for the fairies. If you were eating and food fell from you, it was not right to take it back, for the fairies wanted it. Many families are very serious about this even now. The luckiest thing to do in such cases is to pick up the food and eat just a speck of it and then throw the rest away to the fairies. 'Ghosts and apparitions are commonly said to live in isolated thorn-bushes, or thorn-trees. Many lonely bushes of this kind have their ghosts. For example, there is Fanny's Bush, Sally's Bush, and another I know of in County Sligo near Boyle.' _Personal Opinions._--'The fairies of any one race are the people of the preceding race--the Fomors for the Fir Bolgs, the Fir Bolgs for the Dananns, and the Dananns for us. The old races died. Where did they go? They became spirits--and fairies. Second-sight gave our race power to see the inner world. When Christianity came to Ireland the people had no _definite_ heaven. Before, their ideas about the other world were vague. But the older ideas of a spirit world remained side by side with the Christian ones, and being preserved in a subconscious way gave rise to the fairy world.' EVIDENCE FROM COUNTY ROSCOMMON Our next place for investigation will be the ancient province of the great fairy-queen Meave, who made herself famous by leading against Cuchulainn the united armies of four of the five provinces of Ireland, and all on account of a bull which she coveted. And there could be no better part of it to visit than Roscommon, which Dr. Douglas Hyde has made popular in Irish folk-lore. _Dr. Hyde and the Leprechaun._--One day while I was privileged to be at Ratra, Dr. Hyde invited me to walk with him in the country. After we had visited an old _fort_ which belongs to the 'good people', and had noticed some other of their haunts in that part of Queen Meave's realm, we entered a straw-thatched cottage on the roadside and found the good house-wife and her fine-looking daughter both at home. In response to Dr. Hyde's inquiries, the mother stated that one day, in her girlhood, near a hedge from which she was gathering wild berries, she saw a leprechaun in a hole under a stone:--'He wasn't much larger than a doll, and he was most perfectly formed, with a little mouth and eyes.' Nothing was told about the little fellow having a money-bag, although the woman said people told her afterwards that she would have been rich if she had only had sense enough to catch him when she had so good a chance.[22]