The celebrated fall of the Liffey, near Ballymore Eustace, is named Pool-a-Phooka, or The Pooka's Hole. Near Macroom, in the county of Cork, are the ruins of a castle built on a rock, named Carrig-a-Phooka, or The Pooka's Rock. There is an old castle not far from Dublin, called Puck's Castle, and a townland in the county of Kildare is named Puckstown. The common expression play the Puck is the same as play the deuce, play the Devil.
The most remarkable of the Fairy-tribe in Ireland, and one which is peculiar to the country, is the Leprechaun.[438] This is a being in the form of an old man, dressed as he is described in one of the following tales. He is by profession a maker of brogues; he resorts in general only to secret and retired places, where he is discovered by the sounds which he makes hammering his brogues. He is rich, like curmudgeons of his sort, and it is only by the most violent threats of doing him some bodily harm, that he can be made to show the place where his treasure lies; but if the person who has caught him can be induced (a thing that always happens, by the way) to take his eyes off him, he vanishes, and with him the prospect of wealth. The only instance of more than one Leprechaun being seen at a time is that which occurs in one of the following tales, which was related by an old woman, to the writer's sister and early companion, now no more.
Yet the Leprechaun, though, as we said, peculiar to Ireland, seems indebted to England, at least, for his name. In Irish, as we have seen, he is called Lobaircin, and it would not be easy to write the English Lubberkin more accurately with Irish letters and Irish sounds. Leprechaun is evidently a corruption of that word.[439] In the time of Elizabeth and James, the word Lubrican was used in England to indicate some kind of spirit. Thus Drayton gives as a part of Nymphidia's invocation of Proserpina:
By the mandrake's dreadful groans;
By the Lubrican's sad moans;
By the noise of dead men's bones
In charnel-house rattling.
That this was the Leprechaun is, we think, clear; for in the Honest Whore of Decker and Middleton, the following words are used of an Irish footman:
As for your Irish Lubrican, that spirit
Whom by preposterous charms thy lust has raised.
Part II. i. 1.[440]
We thus have the Leprechaun as a well-known Irish fairy, though his character was not understood, in the sixteenth century.
The two following tales we ourselves heard from the peasantry of Kildare in our boyhood:[441]