The day the widow died, a young child seen the white cow travelling away to the mountains. And no man beheld her more, nor evenly heard tell of the like. But the Gap of Glan confronts us to this day, and that is where the creature rose to the light of the world.
III
KATE ELLEN’S WAKE
Kate Ellen lived by her lone for her husband was employed overseas. She was a strange sort of a creature, pale and scared looking, with one blue eye in her head and the other one grey. She had some kind of disease that came at her with a fluttering in her heart. Sometimes she would die of it for a couple of hours, and all the while she was dead she’d be dreaming she was drowning.
There was a fort not a many perches distant from my poor Kate Ellen’s house, and that was a noted place for the Good People to be out diverting themselves. Moreover it was well known to the neighbours that herself used to be away with them, but she allowed there was no truth in the report. Now it happened of a May eve that a young child seen her, and she milking the cushogues along with a score of the fairies. Another night a man on his way from a distant fair found her on the road before him riding with the little horseman.
One day Kate Ellen came into the kitchen of a friend’s house, and she stopped there chatting for an hour’s time. She allowed that she’d surely die in a short space for the disease was making great ravages and the doctors could take no hold of it at all.
“No person can give me the least relief in the world,” says she. “And I’ll be making but the one request of my friends and neighbours, let there be no whiskey at the wake.”
“Sure the like was never heard tell of before,” says the woman of the house. “What use would there be in a dry wake?”