Then the Lord threw him out of Heaven, and all the angels that
belonged to him. While He was 'chucking them out,' an archangel
asked Him to spare some of them, and those that were falling are in
the air still, and have power to wreck ships, and to work evil in
the world.
From this he wandered off into tedious matters of theology, and
repeated many long prayers and sermons in Irish that he had heard
from the priests.
A little further on we came to a slated house, and I asked him who
was living in it.
'A kind of a schoolmistress,' he said; then his old face puckered
with a gleam of pagan malice.
'Ah, master,' he said, 'wouldn't it be fine to be in there, and to
be kissing her?'
A couple of miles from this village we turned aside to look at an
old ruined church of the Ceathair Aluinn (The Four Beautiful
Persons), and a holy well near it that is famous for cures of
blindness and epilepsy.
As we sat near the well a very old man came up from a cottage near
the road, and told me how it had become famous.
'A woman of Sligo had a son who was born blind, and one night she
dreamed that she saw an island with a blessed well in it that could
cure her son. She told her dream in the morning, and an old man said
it was of Aran she was after dreaming.
'She brought her son down by the coast of Galway, and came out in a
curagh, and landed below where you see a bit of a cove.
'She walked up then to the house of my father - God rest his
soul - and she told them what she was looking for.
'My father said that there was a well like what she had dreamed of,
and that he would send a boy along with her to show her the way.
"There's no need, at all," said she; "haven't I seen it all in my
dream?"
'Then she went out with the child and walked up to this well, and
she kneeled down and began saying her prayers. Then she put her hand
out for the water, and put it on his eyes, and the moment it touched
him he called out: "O mother, look at the pretty flowers!"'
After that Mourteen described the feats of poteen drinking and
fighting that he did in his youth, and went on to talk of Diarmid,
who was the strongest man after Samson, and of one of the beds of
Diarmid and Grainne, which is on the east of the island. He says
that Diarmid was killed by the druids, who put a burning shirt on
him, - a fragment of mythology that may connect Diarmid with the
legend of Hercules, if it is not due to the 'learning' in some
hedge-school master's ballad.
