Then she gave a cry and took up her walking stick from the hearth, burned through, and in two pieces, though the fire had seemed to be but a smouldering heap of ashes. We were very sorry, but she said "Don't be sorry. It is well it was into it the harm went." I passed the house two or three hours afterwards; shutters and door were closed, and I felt that she was fretting for the stick that had been "to America and back with me, and had walked every part of the world," and through the loss of which, it may be, she had "paid the penalty."
I told a neighbour about the doctor having attended a man on the mountains—and how after some time, he found that one of the children was sick also, but this had been hidden from him, because if one had to die they wanted it to be the child.
"That's natural," he said. "Let the child pay the penalty if it has to be paid. That's a thing that might happen easy enough."
I was told by M. McGarity:
There was a boy of the Cloonans I knew was at Killinane thatching Henniff's house. And a woman passed by, and she looked up at him, but she never said, "God bless the work." And Cloonan's mother was in the road to Gort and the woman met her and said, "Where did your son learn thatching?" And that day he had a great fall and was brought home hurt, and the mother went to Biddy Early. And she said, "Didn't a red-haired woman meet you one day going into Gort and ask where did your son learn thatching? And didn't she look up at him as she passed? It was then it was done." And she gave a bottle and he got well after a while. (Note [37].)
Some say the evil eye is in those who were baptized wrong, but I believe it's not that, but if, when a woman is carrying, some one that meets her says, "So you're in that way," and she says, "The devil a fear of me," as even a married woman might say for sport or not to let on, the devil gets possession of the child at that moment, and when it is born it has the evil eye.
Margaret Bartly: