Chapter 11 THE BANSHEE IN POETRY AND PROSE

"'Twas the Banshee's lonely wailing,

Well I knew the voice of death,

On the night wind slowly sailing

O'er the bleak and gloomy heath."

These are the dramatic lines Thomas Crofton Croker, in his inimitable "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland," puts in the mouth of the widow MacCarthy, as she is lamenting over the body