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.