CONTENTS
[ PREFACE.]
[ CHAPTER I.] Short and Preliminary
[ CHAPTER II.] A Murderer's Wake and the Arrival of a Stranger
[ CHAPTER III.] Breakfast next morning
[ CHAPTER IV.] Woodward meets a Guide
[ CHAPTER V.] The Bonfire—The Prodigy
[ CHAPTER VI.] Shawn-na-Middogue
[ CHAPTER VII.] A Council of Two
[ CHAPTER VIII.] A Healing of the Breach
[ CHAPTER IX.] Chase of the White Hare
[ CHAPTER X.] True Love Defeated
[ CHAPTER XI.] A Conjurer's Levee
[ CHAPTER XII.] Fortune-telling
[ CHAPTER XIII.] Woodward is Discarded from Mr. Goodwin's Family
[ CHAPTER XIV.] Shawn-na-Middogue Stabs Charles Lindsay
[ CHAPTER XV.] The Banshee.
[ CHAPTER XVI.] A House of Sorrow
[ CHAPTER XVII.] Description of the Original Tory
[ CHAPTER XVIII.] The Toir, or Tory Hunt
[ CHAPTER XIX.] Plans and Negotiations
[ CHAPTER XX.] Woodward's Visit to Ballyspellan
[ CHAPTER XXI.] The Dinner at Ballyspellan
[ CHAPTER XXII.] History of the Black Spectre
[ CHAPTER XXIII.] Greatrakes at Work—Denouement
List of Illustrations
[ Frontispiece ]
[ Titlepage ]
[ Page 631— The Gaze Was Long and Combative ]
[ Page 652— I Will Follow It Until Morning ]
[ Page 697— One Long, Dark, Inexplicable Gaze ]
[ Page 736— Shawn-na-middogue, Your Mother's Victim ]
[ Page 774— Kiss You for the Sake of Our Early Love ]
PREFACE.
There is very little to be said about this book in the shape of a preface. The superstition of the Evil Eye is, and has been, one of the most general that ever existed among men. It may puzzle philosophers to ask why it prevails wherever mankind exists. There is not a country on the face of the earth where a belief in the influence of the Evil Eye does not prevail. In my own young days it was a settled dogma of belief. I have reason to know, however, that, like other superstitions, it is fast fading out of the public mind. Education and knowledge will soon banish those idle and senseless superstitions: indeed, it is a very difficult thing to account for their existence at all. I think some of them have come down to us from the times of the Druids,—a class of men whom, excepting what is called their human sacrifices, I respect. My own opinion is, that what we term human sacrifices was nothing but their habitual mode of executing criminals. Toland has written on the subject and left us very little the wiser. Who could, after all, give us information upon a subject which to us is only like a dream?
What first suggested the story of the Evil Eye to me was this: A man named Case, who lives within a distance of about three or four hundred yards of my residence, keeps a large dairy; he is the possessor of five or six and twenty of the finest cows I ever saw, and he told me that a man who was an enemy of his killed three of them by his overlooking them,—that is to say, by the influence of the Evil Eye.
The opinion in Ireland of the Evil Eye is this: that a man or woman possessing it may hold it harmless, unless there is some selfish design or some spirit of vengeance to call it into operation. I was aware of this, and I accordingly constructed my story upon that principle. I have nothing further to add: the story itself will detail the rest.