“Sure, didn’t the priest threaten to turn him into a rabbit if he didn’t, and no one in the parish would speak to Julia, they were so afraid of Father Madden, and if it hadn’t been for the blind woman that I was speaking about a while ago, sir, it is to the Poor House she’d have to go. The blind woman has a little cabin at the edge of the bog—I’ll point it out to you, sir; we do be passing it by—and she was with the blind woman for nearly two years disowned by her own father. Her clothes wore out, but she was as beautiful without them as with them. The boys were told not to look back, but sure they couldn’t help it.

“Ah, it was a long while before Father Madden could get shut of her. The blind woman said she wouldn’t see Julia thrown out on the roadside, and she was as good as her word for well-nigh two years, till Julia went to America, so some do be saying, sir, whilst others do be saying she joined the fairies. But ’tis for sure, sir, that the day she left the parish Pat Quinn heard a knocking at his window and somebody asking if he would lend his cart to go to the railway station. Pat was a heavy sleeper and he didn’t get up, and it is thought that it was Julia who wanted Pat’s cart to take her to the station; it’s a good ten mile; but she got there all the same!”

“You said something about a curse?”

“Yes, sir. You’ll see the hill presently. And a man who was taking some sheep to the fair saw her there. The sun was just getting up and he saw her cursing the village, raising both her hands, sir, up to the sun, and since that curse was spoken every year a roof has fallen in, sometimes two or three.”

I could see he believed the story, and for the moment I, too, believed in an outcast Venus becoming the evil spirit of a village that would not accept her as divine.

“Look, sir, the woman coming down the road is Bridget Coyne. And that’s her house,” he said, and we passed a house built of loose stone without mortar, but a little better than the mud cabins I had seen in Father MacTurnan’s parish.

“And now, sir, you will see the loneliest parish in Ireland.”

And I noticed that though the land was good, there seemed to be few people on it, and, what was more significant, that the untilled fields were the ruins, for they were not the cold ruins of twenty, or thirty, or forty years ago when the people were evicted and their village turned into pasture—the ruins I saw were ruins of cabins that had been lately abandoned, and I said:

“It wasn’t the landlord who evicted these people.”

“Ah, it’s the landlord who would be glad to have them back, but there’s no getting them back. Every one here will have to go, and ’tis said that the priest will say Mass in an empty chapel, sorra a one will be there but Bridget, and she’ll be the last he’ll give communion to. It’s said, your honor, that Julia has been seen in America, and I’m going there this autumn. You may be sure I’ll keep a lookout for her.”

“But all this is twenty years ago. You won’t know her. A woman changes a good deal in twenty years.”

“There will be no change in her, your honor. Sure, hasn’t she been with the fairies?”