As children we were always afraid of fairies, and were taught to say ‘God bless them! God bless them!’ whenever we heard them mentioned. In our family we always made it a point to have clean water in the house at night for the fairies. If anything like dirty water was thrown out of doors after dark it was necessary to say ‘Hugga, hugga salach!’ as a warning to the fairies not to get their clothes wet. Untasted food, like milk, used to be left on the table at night for the fairies. If you were eating and food fell from you, it was not right to take it back, for the fairies wanted it. Many families are very serious about this even now. The luckiest thing to do in such cases is to pick up the food and eat just a speck of it and then throw the rest away to the fairies. Ghosts and apparitions are commonly said to live in isolated thorn-bushes, or thorn-trees. Many lonely bushes of this kind have their ghosts. For example, there is Fanny’s Bush, Sally’s Bush, and another I know of in County Sligo near Boyle. ‘The fairies of any one race are the people of the preceding race–the Fomors for the Fir Bolgs, the Fir Bolgs for the Dananns, and the Dananns for us. The old races died. Where did they go? They became spirits, and fairies. Second-sight gave our race power to see the inner world. When Christianity came to Ireland the people had no definite heaven. Before, their ideas about the other world were vague. But the older ideas of a spirit world remained side by side with the Christian ones, and being preserved in a subconscious way gave rise to the fairy world.’ Evans-Wentz’ witness here was ‘a professor in a Catholic college in West Ireland’. Evans-Wentz 70