Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series
History
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series
Atlantic Coast (Ireland) -- Social life and customs; Folklore -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs
She gave me a bottle for my wife, but when I got to the workhouse,
where I had to put her in the hospital, they wouldn't let me through
the gate for they heard where I had been. So I had to hide the bottle
for a night by a wall, on the grass, and I sent my brother's wife to
find it, and to bring it to her in the morning into the workhouse.
But it did her no good, and Biddy Early told her after it was because
I didn't bring it straight to her, but had left it on the ground for
the night.
* * * * *
Biddy Early beat all women. No one could touch her. I knew a girl,
a friend of my own, at Burren and she was sick a long while and the
doctors could do nothing for her, and the priests read over her but
they could do nothing. And at last the husband went to Biddy Early and
she said, "I can't cure her, and the woman that can cure her lives in
the village with her." So he went home and told this and the women of
the village came into the house and said, "God bless her," all except
one, and nothing would make her come into the house. But they watched
her, and one night when a lot of them were sitting round the fire
smoking, she let a spit fall on the floor. So they gathered that up
(with respects to you), and brought it in to the sick woman and rubbed
it to her, and she got well. It might have done as well if they brought
a bit of her petticoat and burned it and rubbed the ashes on her. But
there's something strange about spits, and if you spit on a child or a
beast it's as good as if you'd say, "God bless it."
_John Curtin:_
I was with Biddy Early one time for my brother. She was out away in
Ennis when we got to the house, and her husband that she called Tommy.
And the kitchen was full of people waiting for her to come in. So then
she came, and the day was rainy, and she was wet, and she went over
to the fire, and began to take off her clothes, and to dry them, and
then she said to her husband: "Tommy, get the bottle and give them
all a drop." So he got the bottle and gave a drink to everyone. But
my brother was in behind the door, and he missed him and when he came
back to the fire she said: "You have missed out the man that has the
best heart of them all, and there he is behind the door." And when my
brother came out she said, "Give us a verse of a song," and he said,
"I'm no songster," but she said, "I know well that you are, and a good
dancer as well." She cured him and his wife after.
There was a neighbour of mine went to her too, and she said: "The
first time you got the touch was the day you had brought a cart of
turf from that bog at Ballinabucky to Scahanagh. And when you were
in the road you got it, and you had to lie down on the creel of turf
till you got to the public road." And she told him that he had a pane
of glass broke in his window and that was true enough. She must have
been away walking with the faeries every night or how did she know
that, or where the village of Scahanagh was?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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