Our next witness is Bridget O'Conner, a near neighbour to Patrick
Waters, in Cloontipruckilish. When I approached her neat little cottage
she was cutting sweet-pea blossoms with a pair of scissors, and as I
stopped to tell her how pretty a garden she had, she searched out the
finest white bloom she could find and gave it to me. After we had talked
a little while about America and Ireland, she said I must come in and
rest a few minutes, and so I did; and it was not long before we were
talking about fairies:--
_The Irish Legend of the Dead._--'Old Peggy Gillin, dead these thirty
years, who lived a mile beyond Grange, used to cure people with a secret
herb shown to her by her brother, dead of a fairy-stroke. He was drowned
and _taken_ by the fairies, in the big drowning here during the herring
season. She would pull the herb herself and prepare it by mixing spring
water with it. Peggy could always talk with her dead relatives and
friends, and continually with her brother, and she would tell everybody
that they were with the fairies. Her daughter, Mary Short, who inherited
some of her mother's power, died here about three or four years ago.
'I remember, too, about Mary Leonard and her daughter, Nancy Waters.
Both of them are dead now. The daughter was the first to die, as it
happened, and in child-birth. When she was gone, her mother used to wail
and cry in an awful manner; and one day the daughter appeared to her in
the garden, and said, "The more you wail for me, the more I am in
torment. Pray for me, but do not wail."'
_A Midwife Story._--'A country nurse was requested by a strange man on
horseback to go with him to exercise her profession; and she went with
him to a castle she didn't know. When the baby was born, every woman in
the place where the event happened put her finger in a basin of water
and rubbed her eyes, and so the nurse put her finger in and rubbed it on
one of her eyes. She went home and thought no more about it. But one day
she was at the fair in Grange and saw some of the same women who were in
the castle when the baby was born; though, as she noticed, she only
could see them with the one eye she had wet with the water from the
basin. The nurse spoke to the women, and they wanted to know how she
recognized them; and she, in reply, said it was with the one eye, and
asked, "How is the baby?" "Well," said one of the fairy women; "and what
eye do you see us with?" "With the left eye," answered the nurse. Then
the fairy woman blew her breath against the nurse's left eye, and said,
"You'll never see me again." And the nurse was always blind in the left
eye after that.'
THE SPIRIT WORLD AT CARNS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account