THE TIPPERARY WITCH.
THERE is something much more pleasant and touching about the Irish rustic superstitions than there is about the English. Superstition makes the English boor simply brutal and pitiless, while in the Irish peasant it excites the lively credulous imagina- tion of a child. At Sible Hedingham the other day the Essex villagers regarded the mere suspicion that poor old Dummy was preternaturally endowed as lawful justification for all sorts of ex- perimental torment. No sooner do English rustics suspect de- moniacal agency than they deliver themselves up to mixed feelings of anger and curiosity, and set about their tortures partly in the spirit of cruel fear and partly in the spirit of scientific investi- gation,—partly like inquisitors, and partly like artillerymen trying with their guns the strength of a renowned fort. They want to hurt the demon, and they want also to know how much it can endure,— whether a few hours under water will have the effect of sending it away, or brickbats applied to the organism of the possessed person will affect ft at all unpleasantly. A hundred and fifty years ago Addison described the rural Eng- lish feeling towards a witch as precisely that which it still is :— " In our return home Sir Roger told us that old Moll White had often been brought before him for making children spit pins and giving maids the nightmare, and that the country people would be tossing her into a pond and trying experiments with her every day if it was not for him and his chaplain." There is no such feeling towards a gipsy, because a gipsy is supposed to work only by a traditional knowledge of natural signs which anybody might acquire if he could find the key ; there is nothing preternatural attri- buted to the gipsy, onlya wilder life and more intimate acquaintance with natural secrets. But the moment the suspicion of preternatural powers suggests itself the English rustic becomes brutal. The belief in fairies or kindly preternatural agencies has wholly vanished from England, while the belief in demons or the black art still lingers to a considerable extent. How different the state of feeling is in Ireland the very curious examination of three or four "bewitched" people before the magistrates of Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, on Thursday week will sufficiently show. The witch was one Mrs. Mary Doheny, the wife of a blind man, who appeared at Carrick- on-Suir about fourteen months ago with a reputation for preter- natural powers which she soon began to sustain and increase. The charge against her was of cheating certain persons afterwards examined in Court, and who evidently were far from admitting that they had been cheated at all, out of subsidies not in money but in food, on the false pretence that they were for the sup- port of deceased relatives of the contributors recently restored to life—or sufficiently so to need food. The scene in the Court- house of Carrick-on-Suir was a very curious one. People of all ranks thronged from all sides to hear the examination, and even the most educated persons present were, it is said, in parts of the evidence visibly awestruck and confounded by the simple faith and earnest testimony of more than one witness to the preternatural facts alleged. The witnesses called against Mrs. Doheny certainly testified to the continuous stream of subsidies with which they had supplied her for their rather uncomfortably situated relatives,—who appear to have half got back from the grave, but still to be, if we may so term it, spiritual invalids living on earth, but in mysterious seclusion amongst the " good people," and preparing on a mild diet of tea and other food generally known to the medical profession as " slops" for their more active return to life ; but while they gave this evidence they not only imputed no falsehood to Mrs. Doheny, but were even eager in their simple faith that the subsidies had actually been needed and consumed by their half-reanimated kinsmen, whom they had, they said, seen with their own eyes. There is something inexpressibly childlike about the whole story. In reading it we feel as if we were present at the birth of one of those Irish fairy legends related with so much spirit by Mr. Lover, in which humpbacks sleeping in haunted moats so please the " good people" as not only to get rid of their humps but have them transferred to the persons of their cruel enemies, or banshees flit round decaying mansions wailing forth the death-song of some one of its inmates.
There were no fewer apparently than five independent witnesses who asserted that they had seen the forms of relatives long dead restored to life, always it appears in Mrs. Doheny's presence, though she does not seem to have claimed any power in the matter. The first witness was "Sub-Constable Joseph Reeves," who stated that after Mrs. Doheny's appearance at Carrick-on-Suir some four- teen months ago she began to doctor his child for him with herbs. The child was afflicted with epileptic fits, and Mrs. Doheny's reme- dies certainly gained it quieter sleep, he thought, than it had ever had before. But after this little experiment in the healing art, in which she does not appear to have been strikingly successful, she seems to have diverted her energies into more exciting chan- nels. We are told that one night at twelve o'clock, while Mrs. Doheny's medical attentions were being directed to the child, Mrs. Reeves, the wife of the sub-constable, had a vision when she was " in bed, but not asleep," of her deceased father Mr. Mullins, who said "he would return home to me in perfection,"—whatever that may have meant. Mrs. Doheny " had not said anything to me of my father till I told her this circumstance," but the remark appears to have been carefully laid up in Mre. Doheny's heart, and to have suggested the important change of her "base of operations" from administering physical seda- tives to the child to administering spiritual stimulants to the parents. After the hint dropped by Mrs. Reeves of her expectation, that her father would return to her " in perfection," Mrs. Doheny appears to have made statements to the effect that he had re- turned to life, and would soon manifest himself to his daughter
and her family. About four months or more ago " Sub-Constable Joseph Reeves" was asked by Mrs. Doheny to go with her to Knockroe, where he would see his late father-in-law. The man, accompanied by his boy Terence, a child of eight years of age, started, but on getbing to Knockroe appears to have seen nothing till Mrs. Doheny came up ten minutes after him, when pointing in a particular direction she asked Reeves if he saw anything. " I replied, ' Yes,' for I saw my father-in-law William Mullins (who had been dead three years) about twenty yards distant from me." Asked by
the magistrate whether he was frightened, Reeves replied simply, " I was not, Sir; this is a rare case in a court of justice, and a laughable one to some people, but there have been instances of the kind before." He had known his father-in.law, he said, for six- teen years, and " ought" to know him. " We remained looking at him for a time ; he was standing in the field with a stick in his hand ; his side-face was turned towards me. There was good light at the time, about eight o'clock in the evening. I don't think William Mullins is dead now, but he was dead. I have been send- ing him food for the last four months since he came to life. I sent bread, butter, and tea once in each of the twenty-four hours, some- times by the defendant and sometimes by my wife's niece. Defen- dant asked in my presence for the food, and as it was after I had seen William Mullins alive, I consented." Reeves further said that he had lost a son named William, who died atseven years of age in 1860. Two months ago Mrs. Doheny told him "-to go to Duggan's waste-house and I would see him." This he did, again with his son Terence, and he asserts that they both saw his late son William standing inside the window with a dead aunt (Mar- garet Power) who had died about seven years ago. "They came to the window and I walked up to it, —there was only the glass be- tween us. , . . The boy Terence remarked to me when they came to the window, There's Will and his aunt." We may casually note here the remarkably tenacious memory of the living boy Terence, who is only eight years old. His little brother had died when he was only four years old, and his aunt when he was only one year old ; bub he recognizes them at once. The dead or risen boy was said to be in the same clothes in which he died. The magistrate, asking if the lad had had his clothes on when he died, his mother, who was sating in court, cried out, " Oh, God help us ! he had, he had !" and Iteeveszoes on, " Yes, he died in his chair ; he appeared to me to 'have grown since he died ; he did not look very badly, though' he, was delicate ; he had no hat on." Of the aunt he says that she -did not wear a crinoline, " they were not in fashion when she died,' but we are not assured whether she died in those clothes or has dressed since. ,There also appears to have been a separate mani- festation. of some of these deceased persons to Mrs. Reeves. Mrs. Doheny, she said, brought her father "and showed him to me. She also showed me Tom Sheehan [a deceased relative of Reeves], who was lame, and my own child. They were all alive." The niece of Mrs. Reeves, who is described as a "fine, intelligent girl,"' also swore positively that every night,—but " after dark,"—She brought tea, milk, butter, bread, and other food, and gave them to her uncle Tom Sheehan, who was always standing under the wall of the old " waste-house." She swore positively that it was to her deceased uncle Tom Sheehan, and no one else, that she delivered the food. A fifth witness was an ex-policeman, James-Hayes, but. as he had known none of the deceased parties in their lifetime, except by description, his evidence only proved that he had seen persons whom he believed on his friends' word to be dead people restored to life. These persons still appear to be in a very delicate state. The dead father Mullins indeed seems to be hearty, under the protection of the "good people," smokes, „and can manage new potatoes and eggs. But "Mrs. Doheny said my sisters and son were too delicate to eat new potatoes and eggs, and I changed the diet next night." Some tea was sent back as not good enough for the wards of the fairies, two months ago, and fresh tea of a better quality was substituted. William Mullins wanted clothes but once ; and then he made shift with one of his daughter's chemises for a shirt. The pro- mise held out by-Mrs. Doheny appears to be that all these shadowy forms now undergoing their novitiate for a second earthly life in the deserted house near the moat of Ballydine will, after due as- similation respectively of new potatoes, eggs, and bread and milk by the hardier men, and superior tea by the boy and women, be able to come back quite to life, and that whenever that occurs they will "bring their living with them,"—an event apparently much to be desired, as the intermediate state is rather expensive to relations who are still enjoying their first lease of life, and on whom it is rather hard to ask them to work so hard for relatives who are about to enjoy their second. However, when they quite return to life they are to bring not only money but " land in the county of Waterford"—or perhaps rather the title to it— with them, which is certainly a consolatory hope ; only as the title can only have been gained by a conveyance effected in the other world, it must still be a harassing doubt to the sub-constable whether earthly lawyers will recognize its `validity. Indeed we fear the wholesome efficacy of the Encumbered Estates Act would .soon be neutralized if this sort of lien upon land were ad- mitted.
The whole story shows a wonderful Irish naiveté and amiability with its marvellous credulity. The placidfaith with which the sub- constable and his family accept the intermediate state, and send their tributes of new potatoes, eggs, milk, butter, and tea to the unreal world, in the sanguine hope of a reversionary right to real property in Waterford in compensation for these pious labours, is quite touching iu its simpliCity. A whole family give dairy pro-
'duce to ghosts or fairies, and hope fora farm in Waterford as their reward ! Was there ever confidence in imaginary powers so profound 2
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