And those they bring away are always glad to be brought back again. If you were to bring a heifer from those mountains beyond and to put it into a meadow, it would be glad to get back again to the mountain, because it is the place it knows.
Coaches they make up when they want to go driving, with wheels and all, but they want no horses. There might be twenty of them going out together sometimes, and all full of them.
They are everywhere around us, and may be within a yard of us now in the grass. But if I ask you, "What day is tomorrow," and you said, "Thursday," they wouldn't be able to overhear us. They have the power to go in every place, even on to the book the priest is using.
There was one John Curran lived over there towards Bunahowe, and he had a cow that died, and they were striving to rear the calf—boiled hay they were giving it, the juice the hay was boiled in. And you never saw anything to thrive as it did. And one day some man was looking at it and he said, "You may be sure the mother comes back and gives it milk." And John Curran said, "How can that be, and she dead?" But the man said, "She's not dead, she's in the forth beyond. And if you go towards it half an hour before sunrise you'll find her, and you should catch a hold of her and bring her home and milk her, and when she makes to go away again, take a hold of her tail and follow her." So he went out next morning, half an hour before sunrise, up toward the forth, and brought her home and milked her, and when the milking was done she started to go away and he caught a hold of the tail and was carried along with her. And she brought him into the forth, through a door. And behind the door stood a barrel, and what was in the barrel is what they put their finger in, and touch their forehead with when they go out, for if they didn't do that all people would be able to see them. And as soon as he got in, there were voices from all sides. "Welcome, John Curran, welcome, John Curran." And he said: "The devil take you, how well you know my name; it's not a welcome I want, it's my cow to bring home again." So in the end he got the cow and brought her home. And he saw there a woman that had died out of the village about ten years before, and she suckling a child. (Note [26].)
Surely I knew Biddy Early, and my uncle was a friend of hers. It was from the same power they got the cures. My uncle left me the power, and I was well able to do them and did many, but my stock was all dying and what could I do? So I gave a part of the power to Mrs. Tobin that lives in Gort, and she can cure a good many things. Biddy Early told me herself that where she got it was when she was a servant girl in a house, there was a baby lying in the cradle, and he went on living for a few years. But he was friendly to her and used to play tunes for her and when he went away he gave her the bottle and the power. She had but to look in it and she'd see all that had happened and all that was going to happen. But he made her make a promise never to take more than a shilling for any cure she did, and she would not have taken fifty pounds if you offered it to her, though she might take presents of bread and wine and such things.
The cure for all things in the world? Surely she had it and knew where it was. And I knew it myself too—but I could not tell you of it. Seven parts I used to make it with, and one of them is a thing that's in every house.
There's a lake beyond there, and my uncle one day told us by name of a man that would be drowned there at twelve o'clock that day. And so it happened.
One time I was walking on the road to Galway, near the sea, and another man along with me. And I saw in a field beside the road a very small woman walking down towards us, and she smiling and carrying a can of water in her hand, and she was dressed in a blue spencer. So I asked the other man did he see her, and he said he did not, and when I came up to the wall she was gone.