Synopsis: W.B. Yeats: "[This book] haunted me as few books have ever haunted me, for it spoke in strange wayward stories and birdlike little verses of things and person I remember or had dreamed of." Nine of the 11 stories contain elements of the supernatural. The Literary News, May, 1895: The "Ballads" are ghost stories, legends, fairy-tales, all the manifold varieties of popular fiction and superstition filling the very air of Ireland, and they alternate with lovely songs, ripples of poetry that seem to have made themselves so cunning in their worksmanship. In prose pieces almost without exception, the note is cruelty, the fanciful, unimaginative cruelty which darkens the dreams of a people which has supped full of horrors... the monstrous formless horror that broods over her heathen stories recalls the atmosphere of those Indian tales in which [Rudyard Kipling] brings the dread realities of Eastern life before the happier West.