There was an old woman I remember, Mrs. Sheridan, and she had to go with them for two or three hours every night for a while, and she'd make great complaints of the hardship she'd meet with, and how she'd have to spend the night going through little boreens or in the churchyard at Kinvara, or they'd bring her down to the seashore. They often meet with hardships like that, those they bring with them, so it's no wonder they're glad to get back. This world's the best.
There was a woman living over there near Aughsulis, and a few years ago she lost a fine young milch cow, with its first calf. And she and the three boys in the house salted it down and they ate the half of it and they couldn't eat the other half, it was too hard or too tough, and they put it under the dung that was in the yard, the way it would melt into it. And when the springtime came, they turned up the dung, and in the place it was buried they found nothing but three planks of the wood that's cut in Connemara—deal they call it. So the cow never died, but was brought away with themselves. For many a young boy and young woman goes like that, and there's no doubt at all that Mary Hynes was taken. There's some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern was there beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland. (Note [41].)
There's a man now living between this place and Kinvara, Fannen his name is, and he goes away with them, and he's got delicate and silly like. One night he was in that bad place that's near the chapel of Kinvara, and he found a great crowd of them about him and a man on a white horse was with them, and tried to keep him, and he cried and struggled and they let him go at last. But now the neighbours all say he does be going with them, and he told me himself he does. I wouldn't be afraid of him when I'd meet him on the road, but many of the neighbours would be afraid.
And two of his sons have got silly. They found a bar of gold one time out playing in the field, and the money they got for it they put it in the bank. But I believe it's getting less now, and what good did it do them when they went like that? One of the boys was to be a priest, but they had to give that up when he got silly. It was no right money. And they'd best not have touched it.
Mrs. Finnegan:
Dreams, we should not pay too much attention to, and we should judge them well, that is, if a dream is bad or good, we should say "It's a good dream"; and we should never tell a dream to anyone fasting; and it's said if you tell your dream to a tree fasting, it will wither up. And it's better to dream of a person's downfall than of him being up. When the good people take a cow or the like, you'll know if they did it by there being no fat on what's left in its place and no eyes in it. When my own springer died so sudden this year, I was afraid to use it. But Pat Hevenor said, "It's a fool you are, and it might save you the price of a bag of meal to feed the bonifs with a bit of it." And he brought the cart and brought it home to me. So I put down a bit to boil for the bonifs to try it, for I heard that if it was their work, it would go to water. But there was fat rising to the top, that I have enough in the shed to grease the cart wheels for a year. So then I salted a bit of it down.
If they take any one with them, yourself or myself it might be, they'll put some old spent man in his place, that they had with them a long time, and the father and the mother and the children will think it is the child or the father or the mother that is in it. And so it may be he'd get absolution. But as for the old faeries that were there from the beginning, I don't know about them. (Note [42].)