I watched them from the Dun for a long time after they had started.
Wind and rain were driving through the sound, and I could see no
boats or people anywhere except this one black curagh splashing and
struggling through the waves. When the wind fell a little I could
hear people hammering below me to the east. The body of a young man
who was drowned a few weeks ago came ashore this morning, and his
friends have been busy all day making a coffin in the yard of the
house where he lived.
After a while the curagh went out of sight into the mist, and I came
down to the cottage shuddering with cold and misery.
The old woman was keening by the fire.
'I have been to the house where the young man is,' she said, 'but I
couldn't go to the door with the air was coming out of it. They say
his head isn't on him at all, and indeed it isn't any wonder and he
three weeks in the sea. Isn't it great danger and sorrow is over
every one on this island?'
I asked her if the curagh would soon be coming back with the priest.
'It will not be coming soon or at all to-night,' she said. 'The wind
has gone up now, and there will come no curagh to this island for
maybe two days or three. And wasn't it a cruel thing to see the
haste was on them, and they in danger all the time to be drowned
themselves?'
Then I asked her how the woman was doing.
'She's nearly lost,' said the old woman; 'she won't be alive at all
tomorrow morning. They have no boards to make her a coffin, and
they'll want to borrow the boards that a man below has had this two
years to bury his mother, and she alive still. I heard them saying
there are two more women with the fever, and a child that's not
three. The Lord have mercy on us all!'
I went out again to look over the sea, but night had fallen and the
hurricane was howling over the Dun. I walked down the lane and heard
the keening in the house where the young man was. Further on I could
see a stir about the door of the cottage that had been last struck
by typhus. Then I turned back again in the teeth of the rain, and
sat over the fire with the old man and woman talking of the sorrows
of the people till it was late in the night.
This evening the old man told me a story he had heard long ago on
the mainland: -
There was a young woman, he said, and she had a child. In a little
time the woman died and they buried her the day after. That night
another woman - a woman of the family - was sitting by the fire with
the child on her lap, giving milk to it out of a cup. Then the woman
they were after burying opened the door, and came into the house.
She went over to the fire, and she took a stool and sat down before
the other woman. Then she put out her hand and took the child on her
lap, and gave it her breast. After that she put the child in the
cradle and went over to the dresser and took milk and potatoes off
it, and ate them. Then she went out. The other woman was frightened,
and she told the man of the house when he came back, and two young
men. They said they would be there the next night, and if she came
back they would catch hold of her. She came the next night and gave
the child her breast, and when she got up to go to the dresser, the
man of the house caught hold of her, but he fell down on the floor.
Then the two young men caught hold of her and they held her. She
told them she was away with the fairies, and they could not keep her
that night, though she was eating no food with the fairies, the way
she might be able to come back to her child. Then she told them they
would all be leaving that part of the country on the Oidhche
Shamhna, and that there would be four or five hundred of them riding
on horses, and herself would be on a grey horse, riding behind a
young man. And she told them to go down to a bridge they would be
crossing that night, and to wait at the head of it, and when she
would be coming up she would slow the horse and they would be able
to throw something on her and on the young man, and they would fall
over on the ground and be saved.
She went away then, and on the Oidhche Shamhna the men went down and
got her back. She had four children after that, and in the end she
died.
It was not herself they buried at all the first time, but some old
thing the fairies put in her place.
'There are people who say they don't believe in these things,' said
the old woman, 'but there are strange things, let them say what they
will. There was a woman went to bed at the lower village a while
ago, and her child along with her. For a time they did not sleep,
and then something came to the window, and they heard a voice and
this is what it said -
'"It is time to sleep from this out."
'In the morning the child was dead, and indeed it is many get their
death that way on the island.'
The young man has been buried, and his funeral was one of the
strangest scenes I have met with.
