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. The village was fairly mad about her, many a
fight there was over her, so I suppose the priest was right. He had to
get rid of her; but I think he might not have been so hard upon her as
he was. It is said that he went down to her house one evening; Julia's
people were well-to-do people; they kept a shop; you might have seen it
as we came along the road, just outside of the village it is. And when
he came in there was one of the richest farmers in the country who was
trying to get Julia for his wife. Instead of going to Julia, he had
gone to the father. There are two counters in the shop, and Julia was
at the other, and she had made many a good pound for her parents in
that shop; and he said to the father: 'Now, what fortune are you going
to give with Julia?' And the father said there was many a man who would
take her without any, and Julia was listening quietly all the while at
the opposite counter. The man who had come to marry her did not know
what a spirited girl she was, and he went on till he got the father to
say that he would give L70, and, thinking he had got him so far, he
said,