There is, however, a man in a Galway village who can see nothing but
wickedness. Some think him very holy, and others think him a little
crazed, but some of his talk reminds one of those old Irish visions of
the Three Worlds, which are supposed to have given Dante the plan of
the Divine Comedy. But I could not imagine this man seeing Paradise. He
is especially angry with the people of faery, and describes the faun-
like feet that are so common among them, who are indeed children of
Pan, to prove them children of Satan. He will not grant that “they
carry away women, though there are many that say so,” but he is certain
that they are “as thick as the sands of the sea about us, and they
tempt poor mortals.”
He says, “There is a priest I know of was looking along the ground
like as if he was hunting for something, and a voice said to him, ‘If
you want to see them you’ll see enough of them,’ and his eyes were
opened and he saw the ground thick with them. Singing they do be
sometimes, and dancing, but all the time they have cloven feet.” Yet he
was so scornful of unchristian things for all their dancing and singing
that he thinks that “you have only to bid them begone and they will go.
It was one night,” he says, “after walking back from Kinvara and down
by the wood beyond I felt one coming beside me, and I could feel the
horse he was riding on and the way he lifted his legs, but they do not
make a sound like the hoofs of a horse. So I stopped and turned around
and said, very loud, ‘Be off!’ and he went and never troubled me after.
And I knew a man who was dying, and one came on his bed, and he cried
out to it, ‘Get out of that, you unnatural animal!’ and it left him.
Fallen angels they are, and after the fall God said, ‘Let there be
Hell,’ and there it was in a moment.” An old woman who was sitting by
the fire joined in as he said this with “God save us, it’s a pity He
said the word, and there might have been no Hell the day,” but the seer
did not notice her words. He went on, “And then he asked the devil what
would he take for the souls of all the people. And the devil said
nothing would satisfy him but the blood of a virgin’s son, so he got
that, and then the gates of Hell were opened.” He understood the story,
it seems, as if it were some riddling old folk tale.
“I have seen Hell myself. I had a sight of it one time in a vision. It
had a very high wall around it, all of metal, and an archway, and a
straight walk into it, just like what ’ud be leading into a gentleman’s
orchard, but the edges were not trimmed with box, but with red-hot
metal. And inside the wall there were cross-walks, and I’m not sure
what there was to the right, but to the left there were five great
furnaces, and they full of souls kept there with great chains. So I
turned short and went away, and in turning I looked again at the wall,
and I could see no end to it.
“And another time I saw Purgatory. It seemed to be in a level place,
and no walls around it, but it all one bright blaze, and the souls
standing in it. And they suffer near as much as in Hell, only there are
no devils with them there, and they have the hope of Heaven.
“And I heard a call to me from there, ‘Help me to come out o’ this!’
And when I looked it was a man I used to know in the army, an Irishman,
and from this county, and I believe him to be a descendant of King
O’Connor of Athenry.
“So I stretched out my hand first, but then I called out, ‘I’d be
burned in the flames before I could get within three yards of you.’ So
then he said, ‘Well, help me with your prayers,’ and so I do.
“And Father Connellan says the same thing, to help the dead with your
prayers, and he’s a very clever man to make a sermon, and has a great
deal of cures made with the Holy Water he brought back from Lourdes.”
1902.