Now, had Mrs Moan and her heroic guide passed through the village of Ballycomaisy, the latter would not have felt his fears so strong upon him. The road, however, along which they were now going was a grass-grown bohreen, that led them from behind her cabin through a waste and lonely part of the country; and as it was a saving of better than two miles in point of distance, Mrs Moan would not hear of their proceeding by any other direction. The tenor of her conversation, however, was fast bringing Phil to the state she so graphically and pithily described.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Phil Hannigan, a son of fat Phil’s of Balnasaggart, an’ a cousin to Paddy who lost a finger in the Gansy (Guernsey) wars.”
“I know. Well, Phil, in throth the hairs ’ud stand like stalks o’ barley upon your head, if you heard all I could mintion.”
Phil instinctively put his hand up and pressed down his hat, as if it had been disposed to fly from off his head.
“Hem! ahem! Why, I’m tould it’s wonderful. But is it thrue, Mrs Moan, that you have been brought on business to some o’ the”—here Phil looked about him cautiously, and lowered his voice to a whisper—“to some o’ the fairy women?”
“Husth, man alive—what the sorra timpted you to call them anything but the Good People? This day’s Thursday—God stand betune us an’ harm. No, Phil, I name nobody. But there was a woman, a midwife—mind, avick, that I don’t say who she was—may be I know why too, an’ may be it would be as much as my life is worth”——
“Aisey, Mrs. Moan! God presarve us! what is that tall thing there to the right!”—and he commenced the Lord’s Prayer in Irish as fast as he could get out the words.
“Why, don’t you see, boy, its a fir-tree, but sorra movin’ it’s movin.”
“Ay, faix, an’ so it is; bedad I thought it was gettin’ taller an’ taller. Ay!—hut! it is only a tree.”