Blair Collection > Beside the fire

PREFACE. XXÍ
in the Irish manuscript : " And he (lollann) was not long
at this, until he saw the devilish misformed element, and
the fierce and horrible spectre, and the gloomy disgust-
ing enemy, and the morose unlovely churl (11105^) ; and
this is how he was : he held a very thick iron flail-club
in his skinny hand, and twenty chains out of it, and fifty
apples on each chain of them, and a venomous spell on
each great apple of them, and a girdle of the skins of
deer and roebuck around the thing that was his body,
aiid one eye in the forehead of his black-faced coun-
tenance, and one bare, hard, very hairy hand coming out
of his chest, and one veiny, thick-soled leg supporting him
and a close, firm, dark blue mantle of twisted hard-thick
feathers, protecting his body, and surely he was more
like unto devil than to man." This creature inhabited
a desert, as the Highlander said, and were it not for this
corroborating Scotch tradition, I should not have hesi-
tated to put down the whole incident as the whimsical
invention of some Irish writer, the more so as I had
never heard any accounts of this wonderful creature in
local tradition. This discovery of his counterpart in the
ixighlands puts a new complexion on the matter. Is
the Highland spectre derived from the Irish manuscript
story, or does the writer of the Irish story only embody
in his tale a piece of folk-lore common at one time to
all branches of the Gaelic race, and now all but extinct.
This last supposition is certainly the true one, for it is