"No, your honour, there was no joke in it. I was only telling you what must come. She put her curse on the village twenty years ago, and every year a roof has fallen in and a family has gone away."
"And you believe that all this happens on account of Julia's curse?"
"To be sure I do," he said. He flicked his horse pensively with the whip, and my disbelief seemed to disincline him for further conversation.
"But," I said, "who is Julia Cahill, and how did she get the power to lay a curse upon the village? Was she a young woman or an old one?"
"A young one, sir."
"How did she get the power?"
"Didn't she go every night into the mountains? She was seen one night over yonder, and the mountains are ten miles off, and whom would she have gone to see except the fairies? And who could have given her the power to curse the village?"
"But who saw her in the mountains? She would never walk so far in one evening."
"A shepherd saw her, sir."
"But he may have been mistaken."