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.
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