NOTES
 

    "BANSHEE, correctly written  Beansighe, plural  Mna'-sige, she
fairies or women fairies, credulously supposed, by the common people,
to be so affected to certain families, that they are heard to sing mourn-
ful lamentations about their houses at night, whenever any of fa-
mily labours under a sickness which is to end in death. But no fami-
lies which are not of an ancient and noble stock are believed to be
honoured with this fairy privilege." -- O'BRIEN'S Irish Dictionary.
     For accounts of the appearance of the Irish Banshee, see "Personal
Sketches, &C by Sir Jonah Barrington ; " Miss Lefanu's Memoirs of
her Grandmother, Mrs. Frances Sheridan, (1524.) p. 32 ; " The Me-
moirs of Lady Fanshaw," (quoted by Sir Walter Scott in a note on
"the Lady of the Lake,") &C
     Sir Walter Scott terms the belief in the appearance of the Banshee
"one of the most beautiful" of the leading superstitions of Europe.  In his
"Letters on Demonology," he says that "several families of the High-
lands of Scotland anciently laid claim to the distinction of an attend-
ant spirit, who performed the office of the Irish Banshee," and parti-
cularly refers to the supernatural cries and lamentations which fore-
boded the death of the gallant Mac Lean of Lochbuy.
     "The Welsh Gwrach y Rhibyn (or the hag of the Dribble) bears
some resemblance to the Irish Banshee, being regarded as an omen of
death. She is said to come after dusk and flap her leathern wings
against the window where she warns of death, and in a broken, howl-
ing noise, to call on the one who is to quit mortality by his or her name
several times, as thus, A-a-a-n-ni-i-i-i ! Anni." -- MS. Communication
from Dr. Owen Pughe.  For some further particulars, see, in "A
Relation of Apparitions, &c.  by the Rev. Edmund Jones," his account
of the Kyhirraeth, "a doleful foreboding noise before death ; " and
Howell's " Cambrian Superstitions," (Tipton, 1831.) p.81.
     The reader will probably remember the White Lady of the House of
Brandenburgh, and the fairy Melusine, who usually prognosticated the
recurrence of mortality in some noble family of Poitou. Prince, in his
"Worthies of Devon," records the appearance of a white bird, per-
forming the same office for the worshipful lineage of Oxenham.
     "In the Tyrol, too, they believe in a spirit which looks in at the
window of the house in which a person is to die (Deutsche Sagen,
No. 266.); the white woman with a veil over her head (267.) answers
to the Banshee; but the tradition of the Klage-weib (mourning
woman), in the Luneburger Heath (Spiels Archiv. 297.), resembles 
it still more closely. On stormy slights, when the moon shines faintly
through the fleeting clouds, she stalks, of gigantic stature,  with death-
like aspect, and black hollow eyes, wrapt in grave-clothes which float
in the wind, and stretches her immense arm over the solitary hut,
uttering lamentable cries in the tempestuous darkness.  Beneath the
roof over which the K1age-weib has leaned, one of the inmates must
die in the course of the month." --THE BROTHERS GRIMM, and MS.
Communication from  DR. WILLIAM GRIMM.