When the Manx tongue is dead there will remain, however, just one badge of our race--our superstition. I am proud to tell you that we are the most superstitious people now left among the civilised nations of the world. This is a distinction in these days when that poetry of life, as Goethe names it, is all but gone from the face of the earth. Manxmen have not yet taken the poetry out of the moon and the stars, and the mist of the mountains and the wail of the sea. Of course we are ashamed of the survival of our old beliefs and try to hide them, but let nobody say that as a people we believe no longer in charms, and the evil eye, and good spirits and bad. I know we do. It would be easy to give you a hundred illustrations. I remember an ill-tempered old body living on the Curragh, who was supposed to possess the evil eye. If a cow died at calving, she had witched it. If a baby cried suddenly in its sleep, the old witch must have been going by on the road. If the potatoes were blighted, she had looked over the hedge at them. There was a charm doctor in Kirk Andreas, named Teare-Ballawhane. He was before my time, but I recall many stories of him. When a cow was sick of the witching of the woman of the Curragh, the farmer fled over to Kirk Andreas for the charm of the charm-doctor. From the moment Teare-Ballawhane began to boil his herbs the cow recovered. If the cow died after all, there was some fault in the farmer. I remember a child, a girl, who twenty years ago had a birth-mark on her face--a broad red stain like a hand on her cheek. Not long since, I saw her as a young woman, and the stain was either gone entirely or hidden by her florid complexion. When I asked what had been done for her, I heard that a good woman had charmed her. "Aw, yes," said the girl's mother, "a few good words do no harm anyway." Not long ago I met an old fellow in Onchan village who believed in the Nightman, an evil spirit who haunts the mountains at night predicting tempests and the doom of ships, the _dooinney-oie_ of the Manx, akin to the _banshee_ of the Irish. "Aw, man," said he, "it was up Snaefell way, and I was coming from Kirk Michael over, and it was black dark, and I heard the Nightman after me, shoutin' and wailin' morthal, _how-la-a, how-a-a_. But I didn't do nothin', no, and he came up to me lek a besom, and went past me same as a flood, _who-o-o!_ And I lerr him! Aw, yes, man, yes!" I remember many a story of fairies, some recited half in humour, others in grim earnest. One old body told me that on the night of her wedding-day, coming home from the Curragh, whither she had stolen away in pursuit of a belated calf, she was chased in the moonlight by a troop of fairies. They held on to her gown, and climbed on her back, and perched on her shoulders, and clung to her hair. There were "hundreds and tons" of them; they were about as tall as a wooden broth-ladle, and all wore cocked-hats and velvet jackets.