NOTE 26. The barrel which contained a brew that made the spirits invisible is probably the cauldron of the god Dagda, called "The Undry" "because it was never empty." The Tuatha-de-Danaan, the old Irish divine race, brought with them to Ireland four talismans, the sword, the spear, the stone, and the cauldron. Rhys, in his _Celtic Heathendom_, compares it with the Irish well of wisdom, overhung by nine hazels, and the Welsh "Cauldron of the Head of Hades," set over a fire, blown into a flame by the breath of nine young girls. Girls and hazels were alike, he thinks, symbols of time because of the nine days of the old Celtic week, and comparable with the nine Muses, daughters of Memory. Nutt thought the Celtic cauldron the first form of the Holy Grail. NOTE 27. In my record of this conversation I find a sentence that has dropped out in Lady Gregory's. The old man used these words: "And I took down a fork from the rafters and asked her was it a broom and she said it was," and it was that answer that proved her in the power of the faeries. She was "suggestible" and probably in a state of trance. NOTE 28. The Dundonians are, of course, the Tuatha-de-Danaan, and those with the bag are the "firbolg" or "bag-men," we have now, it may be, a true explanation of a name Professor Rhys has interpreted with intricate mythology. I wonder if these bags are related to the Sporran of the Highlanders. NOTE 29. Here though maybe but in seeming, spiritism and folk-lore are at issue with one another. The spirit of the séance room is described as growing to maturity and remaining in that state. In Swedenborg it moves toward "the day-spring of its youth." Among the country people too, one sometimes hears of the dead growing to the likeness of thirty years in heaven and remaining so. Thirty years, I suppose, because at that age Christ began his ministry. The idea that underlies Mrs. Fagan's statement seems to be that we have a certain measure of life to live out on earth or in some intermediate state. Are the inhabitants of this "intermediate state" the "earthbound" of the spiritists? NOTE 30. Professor Lombroso quotes from Professor Faffofer the following description of how he received news of the death of Carducci: "On the 18th of February, in the evening, our spirit-friends did not at once give us notice of their presence at our sitting, and we waited for them about half an hour. 'Remigo,' on being asked the reason why they had delayed, replied: 'We are in a state of agitation and confusion here. We have just come from a festival--of grief for you and joy for us. We have been present at the death-bed of Carducci." He had died that day and in that very hour and the news had not yet arrived by the ordinary channels. NOTE 31. I was the patient; it seemed to be the only way of coming to intimate speech with the knowledgeable man.