There's a man beyond is a great warrior in this business, and no man within miles of the place will build a house or a cabin or any other thing without him going there to say if it's in a right place.
It was Fagan cured me of a pain I had in my arm, I couldn't get rid of. He gave me a something to drink, and he bid me go to a quarry and to touch some of the stones that were lying outside it and not to touch others of them. Anyway I got well.
And one time down by the hill we were gathering in the red seaweed, and there was a boy there that was leading a young horse, the same way he'd been leading him a year or more. But this day of a sudden he made a snap to bite him, and secondly he reared as if to jump on top of him, and thirdly turned around and made at him with the hoofs. And the boy threw himself to one side and escaped, but with the fright he got he went into his bed and stopped there. And the next day Fagan came and told him everything that had happened, and he said, "I saw thousands on the strand near where it was last night."
Fagan's wife said to me in her house:
Are you right? You are? Then you're my friend. Come here close and tell me is there anything himself can do for you?
I do the fortunes no more since I got great abuse from the priest for it. Himself got great abuse from the priest too—Father Haverty—and he gave him plaster of Paris,—I mean by that he spoke soft and blathered him, but he does them all the same, and Father Kilroy gave him leave when he was here.
It was from his sister he got the cure. Taken she was when her baby was born. She died in the morning and the baby at night. We didn't tell John of it for a month after, where he was away, caring horses. But he knew of it before he came home, for she followed him there one day he was out in the field, and when he didn't know her she said, "I'm your sister Kate." And she said, "I bring you a cure that you may cure both yourself and others." And she told him of the herb and the field he'd find it growing, and that he must choose a plant with seven branches, the half of them above the clay and the half of them covered up. And she told him how to use it.
Twenty years she's gone, but she's not dead yet, but the last time he saw her he said that she was getting grey. Every May and November he sees her, he'll be seeing her soon now. When her time comes to die, she'll be put in the place of some other one that's taken, and so she'll get absolution. (Note [29].)
He has cured many. But sometimes they are vexed with him, for some cure he has done, when he interferes with some person they're meaning to bring away. And many's the good beating they gave him out in the fields for doing that.
Myself they gave a touch to, here in the thigh, so that I lost my walk; vexed with me they are for giving up the throwing of the cup.