Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 9 (1943-01).djvu/125

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Weird Tales

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stances very similar to the witch-tests of medieval and early modern times, but this unfortunate woman was suspected not of being a witch, but a changeling—a fairy woman who had assumed the appearance of Patrick Boland's wife while the real Bridget was spirited away to dwell with the fairy folk in Kylenagranagh Hill.

This business of changing is a favorite trick of the little good people. The Irish peasant, or gentleman, for that matter, never knows for sure whether the wife of his bosom or child of his heart is in fact itself or some fairy masquerading in his or her likeness. It must be very disconcerting.

There are, of course, plenty of "wise folk" in Ireland, and in any other country they'd be called witches. Not in Ireland. They work white rather than black magic, and are for the most part highly respected members of the community.

My own belief is that the Irishman, like the Frenchman, is greatly misunderstood. Because he laughs when he's amused and cries when he's sad, his Saxon neighbors label him libelously "mercurial, irresponsible and impractical." Nothing is farther from the truth. Your Irishman is a hard-minded logical person who can see no virtue in pretending to be other than he is, and who sees no sense in hiding his feelings under a stoical mask. But he is at bottom eminently practical, and the delusions which made a shambles of Europe and the non-Irish British Isles and were in a fair way to do the same thing in our own New England in the late 17th century just didn't impress him at all.

Sprenger, that blood-stained bigot whose witch persecutions were responsible for sending thousands of innocent people to the stake and gallows, and whose bloody zeal makes even the worst acts of the modern Gestapo seem like gentleness, would have been riddin out of any Irish village on a rail if he'd attempted to preach his bestial crusade of witch-finding there. So would Titus Oates and Matthew Hopkins of detestable memory.

The Irishman knows that there are fairies, theyre part of his native sod, they have the