Enchanted Woods - Page 2

coming she gathered herself up
and was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her
and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to
this, never again." He used the word clean as we would use words like
fresh or comely.

Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods. A labourer told
us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is
called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the weed. He
said, "One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he
went away through the path in Shanwalla, an' bid me goodnight. And two
hours after, there he was back again in the yard, an' bid me light a
candle that was in the stable. An' he told me that when he got into
Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head
as big as a man's body, came beside him and led him out of the path an'
round about, and at last it brought him to the lime-kiln, and then it
vanished and left him."

A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain
deep pool in the river. She said, "I came over the stile from the
chapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came and
two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splash
of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me
saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bank
where the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was headless."

A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy went
to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of
hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side
is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with
him, "I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will
stay on it," meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not
be able to go through it. So he took up "a pebble of cow-dung, and as
soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music
that ever was heard." They ran away, and when they had gone about two
hundred yards they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white,
walking round and round the bush. "First it had the form of a woman,
and then of a man, and it was going round the bush."

II

I often entangle myself in argument more complicated than even those
paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at
other times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion
about a nymph of the Illissus, "The common opinion is enough for me." I
believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we
cannot see, and that some of these