"
"How did she get the power?"
"Didn't she go every night into the mountains? She was seen one
night over yonder, and the mountains are ten miles off, and whom
would she have gone to see except the fairies? And who could have
given her the power to curse the village?"
"But who saw her in the mountains? She would never walk so far in
one evening."
"A shepherd saw her, sir."
"But he may have been mistaken."
"He saw her speaking to some one, and nobody for the last two
years that she was in this village dared to speak to her but the
fairies and the old woman you saw at Mass to-day, sir."
"Now, tell me about Julia Cahill; what did she do?"
"It is said, sir, she was the finest girl in these parts. I was
only a gossoon at the time, about eight or nine, but I remember
that she was tall, sir, nearly as tall as you are, and she was as
straight as one of those poplar-trees," he said, pointing to three
trees that stood against the sky. "She walked with a little swing
in her walk, so that all the boys, I have heard, who were grown up
used to look after her, and she had fine black eyes, sir, and she
was nearly always laughing. This was the time when Father Madden
came to the parish. There was courting in it then, and every young
man and every young woman made their own marriages, and their
marriages were made at the cross-road dancing, and in the summer
evenings under the hedges. There was no dancer like Julia; they
used to gather about to see her dance, and whoever walked with her
under the hedges in the summer, could never think about another
woman.
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