One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

There is a hideous kind of hobgoblin called a dullaghan who can take off and put on his head at will; in fact, people generally see him with that useful member under his arm or absent altogether, and on such an occasion it is well to pass on as quietly as possible without disturbing him. Sometimes giddy and frivolous bands of dullaghans have been seen in graveyards at midnight amusing themselves by flinging their heads at one another and kicking them about like footballs. Down in this neighborhood there is a little lake called Lough Gillagancan, which means “the Lake of the Headless Man,” because they are in the habit of haunting it during the long winter nights and playing their ridiculous games there.

Cleena is the queen of the fairies, and once exercised a powerful spell over the peasants around Glengariff, but she is losing her influence. The national school board is opposed to her. The teachers have disputed her power and authority with such persistence that she cannot exercise them among the present generation as she did among those of the past. It is only among the schoolless communities, far back in the rocky glens along the seashore, where the people cannot read or write and do not have candles to illuminate their lonely cabins during the long winter nights, that she is remembered at all. In more thickly settled parts of the country where the national schools stand at three-mile intervals, the children even scoff at her and ridicule her and say that she may play all the pranks she likes with them and welcome. Cleena has been a favorite of the Irish poets for ages, and appears in many old-fashioned love stories.

“God grant ’t is not Cleena, the queen that pursues me;

While I dream of dark groves and O’Donavan’s daughter.”

Cleena often did a kindly act, and when Dooling O’Hartigan, the bosom friend of Murrough, the eldest son and heir apparent of Brian Boru, was on his way to the battle of Clontarf, she met him and tried to persuade him to stay out of the fight. But nothing could induce him to abandon his friends in such an emergency, particularly as the aged king had given Murrough the command of the army that day. Having failed to persuade him, Cleena placed a magic cloak around O’Hartigan and warned him solemnly that he would certainly be slain if he threw it off. He fought fiercely all day by the side of his friend and made fearful havoc among the Danes. The field was strewn with the bodies of the men he slew, and Murrough, observing the slaughter, but being unable to recognize the cause of it, cried out:

“I hear the blows of O’Hartigan, but I cannot see him!”

In order to console and encourage his friend, O’Hartigan threw off the cloak that made him invisible. The moment he stood unprotected an arrow from the bow of a Dane smote him in the temple, and he died for neglecting Cleena’s words of warning.

It is only occasionally that the fairies interfere with people nowadays. Then it is to make trouble for innocent men who are out later than they should be and get bewildered in their brains or suffer other lapses that they are not responsible for. A friend of mine told an amusing story of his coachman, who frequently suffered from the mischievousness of a fairy not long ago, and explained in the morning:

“If yer honor will belave me, it’s the most mystarious thing that ever happened to a mortal man. I was coming p’aceably home along the roadside when I saw the strangest sight that mortal eyes ever looked upon, an’ the ground seemed to go away from me and funny little cr’atures were dancing from one side of the road to the other. Thin all at once I fell down, and I didn’t know another thing until I picked myself up from out of the ditch in the morning.

“Dhrinking, was it, ye say; divil a bit did I taste a drop at all, at all, that day, barring a few glasses I had wid me frinds on the way home.”