One night when he was coming
home from the lighthouse he heard a man riding on the road behind
him, and he stopped to wait for him, but nothing came. Then he heard
as if there was a man trying to catch a horse on the rocks, and in a
little time he went on. The noise behind him got bigger as he went
along as if twenty horses, and then as if a hundred or a thousand,
were galloping after him. When he came to the stile where he had to
leave the road and got out over it, something hit against him and
threw him down on the rock, and a gun he had in his hand fell into
the field beyond him.
'I asked the priest we had at that time what was in it,' he said,
'and the priest told me it was the fallen angels; and I don't know
but it was.'
'Another time,' he went on, 'I was coming down where there is a bit
of a cliff and a little hole under it, and I heard a flute playing
in the hole or beside it, and that was before the dawn began.
Whatever anyone says there are strange things. There was one night
thirty years ago a man came down to get my wife to go up to his
wife, for she was in childbed.
