[141] Heligoland; by William George Black, Blackwood & Sons, 1888, Chapter IV.
[142] Mr. Charles de Kay, in The Century of July 1889, p. 437.
[143] See Mr. Ralston's review in The Academy of May 11, 1889.
[144] These trials and executions for "witchcraft" were the precursors of those which were carried down almost into our own times; and the above allusions to the "wickedness" of those rites only serve to strengthen the growing belief that the relentless persecution of "witches" was based upon most reasonable grounds, and that the motives actuating the "persecutors" were far higher and more sensible than a mere fanatical and narrow-minded hatred of paganism.
[145] For these extracts, see Thorpe's Northern Mythology, I., 14, 212, 213, 214, and 238.
[146] The flat stone, supported on three or four posts, or pillars (as Thorpe calls them), upon which the seid-woman stood, is very suggestive of the cromleac or dolmen. (Cf. the grottes aux fées of Brittany.)
[147] The magical power of the Finns is still recognized by the Swedish peasantry of to-day. An illustration of this appears in an anecdote related in the London Standard of 26 January, 1877, with regard to a Swedish lady "who had been so ill-advised as to insult a Finn, whose magical powers exceed those of the gipsies."
[148] It is no doubt owing to the infusion of Spanish blood in Southern Ireland, still visible in the complexion, as well as in the surnames (such as Costello and Jago, i.e., Diego) of people in that neighbourhood, that this Fierna receives the most un-British title of "Don" prefixed to his name.
[149] Compare this tradition, recorded by Thorpe (Northern Mythology, III., 39):—"In very old times the dwarfs had long wars with men, and also with one another."
[150] "The Death of Diarmaid," by Allan MacRuaridh. See the "Dean of Lismore's Book," p. 30 (Eng. version), and p. 21 (Gaelic).