ABSTRACT
ITHINK I remember Mr. Martyn telling me that he knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the belief in such women as Peg Inerny among the Irish peasants. Unless the imagination has a means of knowledge peculiar to itself, he must have heard of this belief as a child and remembered it in that unconscious and instinctive memory on which imagination builds. Biddy Early,* who journeyed with the people of faery when night fell, and who cured multitudes of all kinds of sickness, if the tales that one hears from her patients are not all fancy, is, I think, the origin of his Peg Inerny ; but there were, and are, many like her. Sometimes, as it seems, they wander from place to place begging their bread, but living all the while a noble second life in faery. They are sometimes called ‘women from the North,’ because witchcraft, and spirits, and faeries come from the North. A Kitarton woman said to a friend who has got me many tales : ‘One time a woman from the North came to our house, and she said a great deal of people are kept below there in the lisses. She had been there herself, and in the night-time, in one moment, they'd be all away at Cruachma, wherever that may be—down in the North, I believe. And she knew everything that was in the house, and told us about my sister being sick, and that there was a hurling match going on that day, and that it was at the Isabella Wood. I'd have picked a lot of stories out of her, but my mother got nervous when she heard the truth coming out, and told me to be quiet. She had a red petticoat on her, the same as any country woman, and she offered to cure me, for it was that time I was delicate, and her ladyship sent me to the salt water. But she asked a shilling, and my mother said she hadn't got it. “You have,” said she, “and heavier metal than that you have in the house.” So then my mother gave her the shilling, and she put it in the fire and melted it, and, says she, “after two days you'll see your shilling again ;” but we never did. And the cure she left, I never took it ; it's not safe, and the priests forbid us to take their cures. No doubt at all she was one of the ingentry (I have never heard this word for the faeries from anybody else) that can take the form of a woman by day and another form by night.’ Another woman in the same neighbourhood said : ‘I saw myself, when I was but a child, a woman come to the door that had been seven years with the good people, and I remember her telling us that in that seven years she'd often been glad to come outside the houses and pick the bits that were thrown into the trough for the pigs ; and she told us always to leave a bit about the house for those that could not come and ask for it : and though my father was a cross man, and didn't believe in such things, to the day of his death we never went up to bed without leaving a bit of food outside the door!’ Sometimes, however, one hears of their being fed with supernatural food, so that they need little or none of our food.
