When she wreathed her hair in thicket bowers,
With the hedge-rose and hare-bell, blue;
I called her my May, in her crown of flowers,
And her smile so soft and new.
And the rose, I thought, never shamed her cheek,
But rosy and rosier made it;
And her eye of blue did more brightly break,
Through the blue-bell that strove to shade it.
One evening I left her asleep in her smiles,
And walked through the mountains, lonely;
I was far from my darling, ah! many long miles,
And I thought of her, and her only;
She darkened my path like a troubled dream,
In that solitude far and drear;
I spoke to my child! but she did not seem
To hearken with human ear;
She only looked with a dead, dead eye,
And a wan, wan cheek of sorrow—
I knew her “fetch!” she was called to die,
And she died upon the morrow.
Our young readers are required to observe that these “Tales of the O’Hara Family” are merely tales, invented to amuse the mind, or create wonder. Yet things of this sort are still believed by ignorant people, and in the dark ages they were credited, or affected to be credited, by those who ought to have known better. Mr. Brand has heaped together a great many of these superstitions.
Besides general notices of death, certain families were reputed to have particular warnings; some by the appearance of a bird, and others by the figure of a tall woman in white, who shrieked about the house. This in Ireland is called the banshee, or “the shrieking woman.”