ie 
= 
ee. ae 
1888.] 265 [Mooney. 
Immediately after death the soul appears before the judgment bar, and 
is sometimes condemd to return and reanimate the body during a further 
term of sickness until by suffering it has been renderd worthy to enter 
heaven. ‘The fairies take advantage of its temporary absence to put one 
of their own number into the body, so that when the soul returns it finds 
its place occupied and is obliged to go with them. When this is thought 
to be the case—as evidenced by the lingering, altho plainly hopeless, 
nature of the ilness—the friends of the sick man put a piece of lus-mér 
(pronounced lusmore, Gaelic ‘‘great herb’’) or foxglove under his bed. 
If he be a changeling the fairies wil at once be compeld to restore, in good 
health, the person taken away. If the invalid be really present in his 
proper person he wil not recover, but die. The idea that the destruction 
or loss of the body forces the soul to become a wanderer is common to 
many primitiv nations,-and is at the bottom of Egyptian embalmment as 
wel as of the Christian horror of cremation. I have not met with any 
other indication of such a belief in Ireland, but in one of Lady Wilde’s 
legends the fairies, who hav captured a wicked old hag, ar represented as 
saying: ‘‘Her soul will never rest in peace, because we shall cut up the 
body in little bits, and the soul will not be able to find it, but wander 
about in the dark to al! eternity without a body.’’* 
Properly speaking, the fairies hav no power to take life, but there is 
another class of spirits altogether malignant, which haunt particular 
localities, hovering invisible in the air overhead, and visit destruction upon 
all who come within their reach. Should an unaccountable sickness or 
death occur in a new hous, it is ascribed to the presence of one of these 
spirits, and the owner will tear down the hous and rebuild it in another 
place. 
Dyina Rrres—Layine OutT—THE MAIsTINIDH. 
The Irishman obeys the injunction to remember his last end, and his 
constant prayer is to be deliverd ‘‘ from a sudden or unprovided death,” 
and to have a ‘‘decent funeral.’”? The poorest old woman wil hoard up 
year after year from her slender means in order that she may be buried 
respectably when life’s struggle is over, and above all, that she may not 
have a pauper’s funeral, while the most poverty-stricken family wil strain 
every nerv to perform the same office for the departed father, mother, 
brother or sister. In-Scotland, ‘‘The first care of the young married wife 
was still, in my young days, to spin and get woven sufficient linen to 
make for herself and her husband their dead claes.”’+ So strong is this 
feeling that the clergy frequently find it necessary to warn their people 
against the reckless extravagance common on such occasions. The ancient 
and widespread practice of expensiv funeral feasts and ceremonies un- 
doubtedly had its origin in the desire that the soul should enter the spirit 
* Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends of Ireland, i, 188, London, 1887. 
+James Napier, Folk-Lore, 55, Paisley, 1879. 
