An old lady in Aghalee believed that when a brown butterfly flew into her kitchen it was a messenger from the fairies to tell her that they would be visiting her house that night and, before going to bed she would sweep the house clean and leave a plate of cheese on the table. Her grandson who told me about it, said that if she had not cheese in the house when she saw the butterfly-messenger, she would go to the shop and buy some. The cheese was, he said, always missing in the morning, and often the old lady saw the marks of little feet in the peat-ash on the hearth. She must have known all about mice and their habits but, apparently, she did not associate them with either the footsteps or the disappearance of the cheese.  The fact that she left only cheese is worth noting, for cheese was regarded as being a necessity at country wakes some years ago, and still is in some districts. The order of procedure was cheese at all meals served to visitors during the wake and meat for the men who returned to the house after the funeral. A Tyrone man gave me a very prosaic explanation for the use of cheese on such occasions, it was that if you eat cheese, you can drink as much whiskey as you like without becoming intoxicated. There may, however, have been another reason, more powerful than immunity from drunkenness, for, after all, not everyone might wish to be immune. McPherson noticed that in Scotland cheese was used to appease fairies at wakes and at the ‘merry meht’ birth celebrations. It is possible that both the Scottish fairies and the Aghalee woman’s fairies were the souls of the dead. Butterflies are known to have been associated with the souls of the dead in Ulster, and we have, too, the belief that the dead live on in graveyards. (Foster, Ulster, 81-82)