At Ballisodare an event happened that brought me back to the superstitions
of my childhood. I do not know when it was, for the events of this period
have as little sequence as those of childhood. I was staying with cousins
at Avena house, a young man a few years older and a girl of my own age and
perhaps her sister who was a good deal older. My girl cousin had often
told me of strange sights she had seen at Ballisodare or Rosses. An old
woman three or four feet in height and leaning on a stick had once come to
the window and looked in at her, and sometimes she would meet people on
the road who would say "how is so-and-so," naming some member of her
family, and she would know, though she could not explain how, that they
were not people of this world. Once she had lost her way in a familiar
field, and when she found it again the silver mounting on a walking-stick
belonging to her brother which she carried had vanished. An old woman in
the village said afterwards "you have good friends amongst them, and the
silver was taken instead of you."
Though it was all years ago, what I am going to tell now must be accurate,
for no great while ago she wrote out her unprompted memory of it all and
it was the same as mine. She was sitting under an old-fashioned mirror
reading and I was reading in another part of the room. Suddenly I heard a
sound as if somebody was throwing a shower of peas at the mirror. I got
her to go into the next room and rap with her knuckles on the other side
of the wall to see if the sound could come from there, and while I was
alone a great thump came close to my head upon the wainscot and on a
different wall of the room. Later in the day a servant heard a heavy
footstep going through the empty house, and that night, when I and my two
cousins went for a walk, she saw the ground under some trees all in a
blaze of light. I saw nothing, but presently we crossed the river and went
along its edge where, they say, there was a village destroyed, I think in
the wars of the 17th century, and near an old grave-yard. Suddenly we all
saw light moving over the river where there is a great rush of waters. It
was like a very brilliant torch. A moment later the girl saw a man coming
towards us who disappeared in the water. I kept asking myself if I could
be deceived. Perhaps after all, though it seemed impossible, somebody was
walking in the water with a torch. But we could see a small light low down
on Knock-na-rea seven miles off, and it began to move upward over the
mountain slope. I timed it on my watch and in five minutes it reached the
summit, and I, who had often climbed the mountain, knew that no human
footstep was so speedy.
From that on I wandered about raths and faery hills and questioned old
women and old men and, when I was tired out or unhappy, began to long for
some such end as True Thomas found. I did not believe with my intellect
that you could be carried away body and soul, but I believed with my
emotions and the belief of the country people made that easy. Once when I
had crawled into the stone passage in some rath of the third Rosses, the
pilot who had come with me called down the passage: "are you all right,
sir?"
And one night as I came near the village of Rosses on the road from Sligo,
a fire blazed up on a green bank at my right side seven or eight feet
above me, and another fire suddenly answered from Knock-na-rea. I hurried
on doubting, and yet hardly doubting in my heart that I saw again the
fires that I had seen by the river at Ballisodare. I began occasionally
telling people that one should believe whatever had been believed in all
countries and periods, and only reject any part of it after much evidence,
instead of starting all over afresh and only believing what one could
prove. But I was always ready to deny or turn into a joke what was for all
that my secret fanaticism. When I had read Darwin and Huxley and believed
as they did, I had wanted, because an established authority was upon my
side, to argue with everybody.