Enchanted Woods

I

Last summer, whenever I had finished my day's work, I used to go
wandering in certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an old
countryman, and talk to him about his work and about the woods, and
once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart
more readily than to me, He had spent all his life lopping away the
witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths,
and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures of
the wood. He has heard the hedgehog--"grainne oge," he calls him--
"grunting like a Christian," and is certain that he steals apples by
rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to
every quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many in
the woods, have a language of their own--some kind of old Irish. He
says, "Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of
some great change in the world. That is why they are hard to kill, and
why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might
claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would
be the serpent's tooth." Sometimes he thinks they change into wild
cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild
cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the
woods. The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away
and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels--whom
he hates--with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times his
eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs
unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw
under them.

I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and
supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats
like, above all, to be in the "forths" and lisses after nightfall; and
he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a
spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about a
marten cat--a rare beast now-a-days. Many years ago he used to work in
the garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden-house where
there was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear people
rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. Once,
at any rate, be has seen an unearthly sight in the woods. He says, "One
time I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight o'clock
one morning when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hair
hanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good, clean
face, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no way
gaudy but simple, and when she felt me