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
Whether all that die go among them I can't say, but it is said they
can take no one without the touch of a Christian hand, or the want of
a blessing from a Christian that would be noticing them.
_A North Galway Woman:_
There are many young women taken in childbirth. I lost a sister of my
own in that way.
There's a place in the river at Newtown where there's stepping-stones
in the middle you can get over by, and one day she was crossing,
and there in the middle of the river, and she standing on a stone,
she felt a blow on the face. And she looked round to see who gave
it and there was no one there, so then she knew what had happened,
and she came to the mother's house, and she carrying at the time. I
was a little slip at that time, with my books in my hand coming from
school, and I ran in and said to my mother, "Here's Biddy coming,"
and she said, "What would bring her at this time of day?" But she
came in and sat down on a chair and she opened the whole story, and
my mother said to quiet her, "It was only a pain in the ear you got,
and you thought it was a blow." And she said, "I never got a blow
that hurted me like that." And the next day, and every day after
that, the ear would swell a little in the afternoon, and then she
began to eat nothing, and five minutes after her baby was born she
died. And my mother used to watch for her for three or four years
after, thinking she'd come back, but she never did.
* * * * *
There was a forth near our house in Meath, and when I was a baby a
woman was carrying me in her arms, and she walked down the four steps
that led into it, and there was a nice garden around it, and she
slipped and fell, and my cheek struck against one of the steps--you can
see the mark yet that I got there. And the woman told my mother and
said, "It's a wonder the child wasn't taken altogether then and there."
One day I was out digging in the field for my brothers, and there
was a sort of a half-ditch between the oats and the potatoes, and I
was digging it down, and of a sudden a sleep came on me and I lay
down. And I suppose I had been asleep about twenty minutes when I was
waked with a hard clout on the face. And I thought it was one of my
brothers and I called out, "You have no right to give me a clout like
that." But my brother was away down the field, and came when he heard
me calling. And I felt a pain in my side as well, and I went into the
house and didn't leave it for two months after with pleurisy, and the
pain never left me till after I was married. I suppose I must have
been on some way of theirs, or some place that belonged to them and
that was known to be an enchanted place, and my father used often to
see it lighted up with candles.
_A Man Herding Sheep:_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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