Myself: I said, Yes, and that I had been seven years in this place come Christmas.
The Priest: He asked, What, and do you never go up to the towns?
Myself: I answered, No.
The Priest: Then, said the priest, thinking long before he spoke, you have not heard of the great sickness that has broken out among your people.
Myself: I told him I had heard nothing.
The Priest: He said it was the sweating sickness, and that vast numbers had fallen to it and many had died. I think he said—I can not be sure—that after fruitless efforts of his own to combat the disease, the Bishop of the island had sent to Ireland a message for him, having heard that the Almighty had blessed his efforts in a like terrible scourge that broke out two years before over the bogs of Western Ireland.
I listened with fear, and began to comprehend much that had of late been a puzzle to me. But before the priest had gone far his sickness overcame him afresh, and he fell in another long unconsciousness. While he lay thus, very silent or rambling afresh through the ways of the past, I know not what feelings possessed me, for my heart was in a great turmoil. But when he opened his eyes again, very peaceful in their quiet light, but with less than before of the power of life in them, he said he perceived that his errand had been fruitless, and that he had but come to my house to die. At that word I started to my feet with a cry, but he—thinking that my thoughts were of our poor people, who would lose a deliverer by his death—told me to have patience, for that God who had smitten him down would surely raise up in his stead a far mightier savior of my afflicted countrymen.
Then in the lapses of his pain he talked of the sickness that had befallen his own people; how it was due to long rains that soaked the soil, and was followed by the hot sun that drew out of the earth its foul sweat; how the sickness fell chiefly on such as had their houses on bogs and low-lying ground; and how the cure for it was to keep the body of the sick person closely wrapped in blankets, and to dry the air about him with many fires. He told me, too, that all medicines he had yet seen given for this disease were useless, and being oftenest of a cooling nature were sometimes deadly. He said that those of his own people who had lived on the mountains had escaped the malady. Much he also said of how men had fled from their wives, and women from their children in terror of the infection, but that, save only in the worst cases, contagion from the sweating sickness there could be none. More of this sort he said than I can well set down in this writing. Often he spoke with sore labor, as though a strong impulse prompted him. And I who listened eagerly heard what he said with a mighty fear, for well I knew that if death came to him as he foretold, I had now that knowledge which it must be sin to hide.
After he had said this the lapses into unconsciousness were more frequent than before, and the intervals of cool reason and sweet respite from pain were briefer. But a short while after midnight he came to himself with a smile on his meagre face and peace in his eyes. He asked me would I promise to do one thing for him, for that he was a dying man; and I told him yes, before I had heard what it was that he wished of me. Then he asked did I know where the Bishop lived, and at first I made no answer.
Bishop's Court they call his house, he said, and it lies to the northwest of this island by the land they have named the Curraghs. Do you know it?