“Let you take a handful of rowan berries and lay them on the stomach or
wherever the pain might be, and if you wrap them in a yellow cloth it
will be better; but they’ll work well enough without that, only not so
quick.”
Driven off by the constable Mrs. Doolan went back to Flanagan’s shop.
She was quite calm and did not any longer appear to be the worse for the
porter she had drunk.
“You’ll give me another sup, now, Mr. Flanagan,” she said. “It’s well
I deserve it. It’s terrible dry work talking to a man like that one who
won’t listen to a word you’re saying.”
Flanagan filled a large tumbler with porter and handed it to her.
“Tell me this now, Mrs. Doolan,” he said.
“What’s the matter with Molly Rahilly and the rest of them?”
“It’s green apples,” said Mrs. Doolan, “green apples that they ate in
the doctor’s garden. Didn’t I see the little lady sitting in the tree
and the rest of the childer with her?”
Dr. Lovaway made a somewhat similar diagnosis. He spent several busy
hours going in and out of the houses where the sufferers lay. It was
not till a quarter past eleven that he returned to his home and the town
settled down for the night. At half-past eleven--long after the legal
closing hour--Sergeant Rahilly was sitting with Mr. Flanagan in the room
behind the shop. A bottle of whisky and a jug of water were on the table
in front of them.
“It’s a queer thing now about that doctor,” said Flanagan. “After what
Dr. Farelly said to me I made dead sure he’d be pleased to find fairies
about the place. But he was not. When I told him it was fairies he
looked like a man that wanted to curse and didn’t rightly know how. But
sure the English is all queer, and the time you’d think you have them
pleased is the very time they’d be most vexed with you.”
IV. A LUNATIC AT LARGE
It was Tuesday, a Tuesday early in October, Dr. Lovaway finished his
breakfast quietly, conscious that he had a long morning before him and
nothing particular to do. Tuesday is a quiet day in Dunailin; Wednesday
is market day and people are busy, the doctor as well as everybody else.
Young women who come into town with butter to sell take the opportunity
of having their babies vaccinated on Wednesday. Old women, with baskets
on their arms, find it convenient on that day to ask the doctor for
something to rub into knee-joints where rheumatic pains are troublesome.
Old men, who have ridden into town on their donkeys, consult the doctor
about chronic coughs, and seek bottles likely to relieve “an impression
on the chest.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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