There was a boy went to Biddy Early for his father, and she said, "It's not any of my business that's on him, but it's good for yourself that you came to me. Weren't you sowing potatoes in such a field one day and didn't you find a bottle of whiskey, and bring it away and drink what was in it?" And that was true and it must have been a bottle they brought out of some cellar and dropped there, for they can bring everything away, and put in its place what will look like it.
There was a boy near Feakle got the touch in three places, and he got a great desire to go out night-walking, and he got sick. And they asked Biddy Early and she said, "Watch the hens when they come in to roost at night, and catch a hold of the last one that comes." So the mother caught it, and then she thought she'd like to see what would Biddy Early do with it. So she brought it up to her house and laid it on the floor, and it began to rustle its wings, and it lay over and died. It was from her brother Biddy Early got the cure. He was sick a long time, and there was a whitethorn tree out in the field, and he'd go and lie under it for shade from the sun. And after he died, every day for a year she'd go to the whitethorn tree, and it is there she'd cry her fill. And then he brought her under and gave her the cure. It was after that she was in service beyond Kinvara. She did her first cure on a boy, after the doctors giving him up.
An Old Man from Kinvara:
My wife is paralysed these thirty-six years, and the neighbours said she'd get well if the child died, for she got it after her confinement, all in a minute. But the child died in a year and eleven months, and she got no better. And then they said she'd get taken after twenty-one years, but that passed, and she's just the same way. And she's as good a Christian as any all the time.
I went to Biddy Early one time about her. She was a very old woman, all shaky, and the crankiest woman I ever saw. And the husband was a fine young man, and he lying in the bed. It was a man from Kinvara half-paralysed I brought with me, and she would do nothing for him at first, and then the husband bid her do what she could. So she took the bottle and shook it and looked in it, and she said what was in him was none of her business. And I had work to get him a lodging that night in Feakle, for the priests had all the people warned against letting any one in that had been to her. She wouldn't take the whiskey I brought, but the husband and myself, we opened it and drank it between us.
She gave me a bottle for my wife, but when I got to the workhouse, where I had to put her in the hospital, they wouldn't let me through the gate for they heard where I had been. So I had to hide the bottle for a night by a wall, on the grass, and I sent my brother's wife to find it, and to bring it to her in the morning into the workhouse. But it did her no good, and Biddy Early told her after it was because I didn't bring it straight to her, but had left it on the ground for the night.
Biddy Early beat all women. No one could touch her. I knew a girl, a friend of my own, at Burren and she was sick a long while and the doctors could do nothing for her, and the priests read over her but they could do nothing. And at last the husband went to Biddy Early and she said, "I can't cure her, and the woman that can cure her lives in the village with her." So he went home and told this and the women of the village came into the house and said, "God bless her," all except one, and nothing would make her come into the house. But they watched her, and one night when a lot of them were sitting round the fire smoking, she let a spit fall on the floor. So they gathered that up (with respects to you), and brought it in to the sick woman and rubbed it to her, and she got well. It might have done as well if they brought a bit of her petticoat and burned it and rubbed the ashes on her. But there's something strange about spits, and if you spit on a child or a beast it's as good as if you'd say, "God bless it."