_There is one visit I have always been a little remorseful about. It was in Mayo where I had gone to see the broken walls and grass-grown hearthstone that remain of the house where Raftery the poet was born. I was taken to see an old woman near, and the friend who was with me asked her about "Those." I could see she was unwilling to speak, and I would not press her, for there are some who fear to vex invisible hearers; so we talked of America where she had lived for a little while. But presently she said, "All I ever saw of_ them _myself was one night when I was going home, and they were behind in the field watching me. I couldn't see them but I saw the lights they carried, two lights on the top of a sort of dark oak pole. So I watched them and they watched me, and when we were tired watching one another the lights all went into one blaze, and then they went away and it went out." She told also one or two of the traditional stories, of the man who had a hump put on him, and the woman "taken" and rescued by her husband, who she had directed to seize the horse she was riding with his left hand._ _Then she gave a cry and took up her walking stick from the hearth, burned through, and in two pieces, though the fire had seemed to be but a smouldering heap of ashes. We were very sorry, but she said "Don't be sorry. It is well it was into it the harm went." I passed the house two or three hours afterwards; shutters and door were closed, and I felt that she was fretting for the stick that had been "to America and back with me, and had walked every part of the world," and through the loss of which, it may be, she had "paid the penalty."_ _I told a neighbour about the doctor having attended a man on the mountains--and how after some time, he found that one of the children was sick also, but this had been hidden from him, because if one had to die they wanted it to be the child._ _"That's natural," he said. "Let the child pay the penalty if it has to be paid. That's a thing that might happen easy enough."_ _I was told by M. McGarity:_ There was a boy of the Cloonans I knew was at Killinane thatching Henniff's house. And a woman passed by, and she looked up at him, but she never said, "God bless the work." And Cloonan's mother was in the road to Gort and the woman met her and said, "Where did your son learn thatching?" And that day he had a great fall and was brought home hurt, and the mother went to Biddy Early. And she said, "Didn't a red-haired woman meet you one day going into Gort and ask where did your son learn thatching? And didn't she look up at him as she passed? It was then it was done." And she gave a bottle and he got well after a while. (_Note_ 37.) * * * * *