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The Poor Scholar, Frank Martin and the Fairies, the Country Dancing Master, and Other Irish Tales
The Poor Scholar Frank Martin and the Fairies the Country Dancing Master and Other Irish Tales Author:William Carleton General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1869 Original Publisher: J. Duffy Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select... more » from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE EIVAL KEHPERS. In the preceding paper we have given an authentic account of what the country folks, and we ourselves at the time, looked upon as a genuine instance of apparition. It appeared to the simple-minded to be a clear and distinct case, exhibiting all those minute and subordinate details which, by an arrangement naturally happy, and without concert, go to the formation of truth. There was, however, but one drawback in the matter, and that was the ludicrous and inadequate nature of the moral motive ; for what unsteady and derogatory notions of Providence must we not entertain when we see the order and purpose of his divine will so completely degraded and travestied, by the fact of a human soul returning to this earth again, for the ridiculous object of settling the claim to a pair of breeches 1 When we see the succession to crowns and kingdoms, and the inheritance to large territorial property and great personal rank, all left so completely undecided that ruin and desolation have come upon nations and families in attempting their adjustment, and when we see a laughable dispute about a pair of breeches settled by a personal revelation from another life, we cannot help asking why the supernatural intimation was permitted in the one case; and not in the other, especially when their relative importance differed so essentially? To follow up this question, however, by insisting upon a principle so absurd, would place Providence in a position so perfectly unreasonable and capricious, that we do not wish to - press the inference so far as admission of divine interfere...« less