There was a forth near our house in Meath, and when I was a baby a woman was carrying me in her arms, and she walked down the four steps that led into it, and there was a nice garden around it, and she slipped and fell, and my cheek struck against one of the steps—you can see the mark yet that I got there. And the woman told my mother and said, "It's a wonder the child wasn't taken altogether then and there."
One day I was out digging in the field for my brothers, and there was a sort of a half-ditch between the oats and the potatoes, and I was digging it down, and of a sudden a sleep came on me and I lay down. And I suppose I had been asleep about twenty minutes when I was waked with a hard clout on the face. And I thought it was one of my brothers and I called out, "You have no right to give me a clout like that." But my brother was away down the field, and came when he heard me calling. And I felt a pain in my side as well, and I went into the house and didn't leave it for two months after with pleurisy, and the pain never left me till after I was married. I suppose I must have been on some way of theirs, or some place that belonged to them and that was known to be an enchanted place, and my father used often to see it lighted up with candles.
A Man Herding Sheep:
I'll tell you now what happened to a little one of my own. She was just five years. And the day I'm speaking of she was running to school down the path before me, as strong and as funny as the day she was born, and laughing and looking back at me. And that night she went to bed as well as ever she was. And it was about eleven o'clock in the night she awoke and gave a great cry, and she said there was a great pain in her knee, and it was in no other part of her. And in the morning she had it yet, and her walk had gone, and I lifted her and brought her out into the street, and she couldn't walk one step if you were to give her the three isles of Aran. And she lived for two nights after that.
When the doctor came and I told him, he said it was the strangest case he ever heard of, and the schoolmistress said, "I thought if I'd brought that child to the hill beyond and threw her down into the sea it would do her no harm, she was that strong."
But if such things happen, it happened to her, and touched she was. It was not death, it was being took away.
An Old Woman in an Aran village:
I'll tell you what happened a son of my own that was so strong and so handsome and so good a dancer, he was mostly the pride of the island. And he was that educated that when he was twenty-six years, he could write a letter to the Queen. And one day a pain came in the thigh, and a little lump came inside it, and a hole in it that you could hardly put the point of a pin in, and it was always drawing. And he took to his bed and was there for eleven months. And every night when it would be twelve o'clock, he would begin to be singing and laughing and going on. And what the neighbours said was, that it was at that hour there was some other left in his place. I never went to any one or any witchcraft, for my husband wouldn't let me but left it to the will of God; and anyway at the end of the eleven months he died.
And his sister was in America, and the same thing came to her there, a little lump by the side of the face, and she came home to die. But she died quiet and was like any other in the night.