An old Irish settler in the backwoods once gravely assured me that the ‘Banshee’, the warning spirit of death or trouble which, he said, belonged to his family when he lived in Ireland, had followed him and his house to Canada. I looked a little doubtful. The old man grew angry because I asked: ‘Did she come out in the ship with you?’ ‘Shure an’ why should she not?’ he replied. ‘Did she not cry all the time me poor wife – God rest her sowl – was in the death thraws? An’ did she not cry the night the cow died?’ That indeed was a proof not to be doubted, so I judiciously held my sceptical tongue, though I thought it might well have been the cat-owl crying to her mate from an old hollow tree near the shanty; but it would have been rank heresy to liken a real faithful family ‘Cry-by-night’, or ‘Banshee’’ to a cat-owl. Later the old man in rather an aggrieved tone, questioned my faith in the ‘little people’, or the fairies. When I suggested it was a long way for them to come across the Atlantic, he took great pains to convince me that if they cared for the family when they lived in Ireland, they would not mind how long the voyage or the distance, so that they could watch over them here (Traill, Pearls and Pebbles, 103-104)