Troth, I'll get a gospel and a scapular, for, to tell you the truth, I observed that Masther Harry gave me a look the other day that made my flesh creep, by rason that he thought the mutton was overdone." "O, you needn't be afeard," replied Barney; "he can overlook or not, as he plaises; if he does not wish to do so, you're safe enough; but when any one like him that has the power wishes to do it, they could wither you by degrees off o' the airth." "God be about us! But, Barney, you didn't tell us how it comes, for all that." "It comes from the fairies.

Doesn't every one know that the fairies themselves has the power of overlookin' both cattle and Christians ?" "That's true enough," she replied; "every one, indeed, knows that.

Sure, my aunt had a child that died o' the fairies." "Yes, but Masther Harry can see them." "What! is it the fairies ?" "Ay, the fairies, but only wid one eye, that piercin' black one of his.
No, no; as I said before, he may walk where he likes, both by night and by day; he's safe from everything of the kind; even a ghost daren't lay a finger on him; and as the devil and the fairies are connected, he's safe from him, too, in this world at laste; but the Lord pity him when he goes to the next; for there he'll suffer _lalty_." The truth is, that in those days of witchcraft and apparitions of all kinds, and even in the present, among the ignorant and uneducated of the lower classes, any female seen at night in a lonely place, and supposed to be a spirit, was termed a white woman, no matter what the color of her dress may have been, provided it was not black.

The same superstition held good when anything in the shape of a man happened to appear under similar circumstances.

Terror, and the force of an excited imagination, instantly transformed it into a black man, and that black man, of course, was the devil himself.