The old man here that lost his hair went to Biddy Early but he didn't want to go, and we forced him and persuaded him. And when he got to the house she said, "It wasn't of your own free will you came here," and she wouldn't do anything for him.
She didn't like either for you to go too late. Dolan's sister was sick a long time, and when the brother went at the last to Biddy Early she gave him a bottle with a cure. But on the way home the bottle was broke, and the car, and the horse got a fright and ran away. She said to him then, "Why did you go to cut down the bush of white thorn you see out of the window?" And then she told him an old woman in the village had overlooked him—Murphy's sister—and she gave him a bottle to sprinkle about her house. I suppose she didn't like that bush being interfered with, she had too much charms.
And when Doctor Folan was sent for to see her he was led astray, and it is beyond Ballylee he found himself. And surely she was taken if ever any one was.
An Old Woman:
I went up to Biddy Early's one time with another woman. A fine stout woman she was, sitting straight up on her chair. She looked at me and she told me that my son was worse than what I was, and for myself she bid me to take what I was taking before, and that's dandelions. Five leaves she bid me pick and lay them out on the table with three pinches of salt on the three middle ones. As to my son, she gave me a bottle for him but he wouldn't take it and he got better without.
The priests were against her, but there was one of them passed near her house one day, and his horse fell forward. And he sent his boy to her and she said, "Tell him to spit on the horse and to say, 'God bless it,'" and he did and it rose again. He had looked at it proud-like without saying "God bless it" in his heart.
Daniel Shea:
It was all you could do to get to Biddy Early with your skin whole, the priests were so set against her. I went to her one time myself, and it was hard when you got near to know the way, for all the people were afraid to tell it.
It was about a little chap of my own I went, that some strange thing had been put upon. When I got to her house there were about fifty to be attended to before me, and when my turn came she looked in the bottle, a sort of a common greenish one that seemed to have nothing in it. And she told me where I came from, and the shape of the house and the appearance of it, and of the lake you see there, and everything round about. And she told me of a lime-kiln that was near, and then she said, "The harm that came to him came from the forth beyond that." And I never knew of there being a forth there, but after I came home I went to look, and there sure enough it was.
And she told me how it had come on him, and bid me remember a day that a certain gentleman stopped and spoke to me when I was out working in the hayfield, and the child with me playing about. And I remembered it well, it was old James Hill of Creen, that was riding past, and stopped and talked and was praising the child. And it was close by that forth beyond that James Hill was born.