Kidnappers - Page 2

his wife walked behind him dressed in black likewise. She gave him a
guinea, and got a little bottle in return. Her husband recovered that
time. Meanwhile the black doctor cured many people; but one day a rich
patient died, and cat, wife, and doctor all vanished the night after.
In a year the man Ormsby fell sick once more. Now he was a goodlooking
man, and his wife felt sure the "gentry" were coveting him. She went
and called on the "faery-doctor" at Cairnsfoot. As soon as he had heard
her tale, he went behind the back door and began muttering, muttering,
muttering-making spells. Her husband got well this time also. But after
a while he sickened again, the fatal third time, and away went she once
more to Cairnsfoot, and out went the faery-doctor behind his back door
and began muttering, but soon he came in and told her it was no use--
her husband would die; and sure enough the man died, and ever after
when she spoke of him Mrs. Ormsby shook her head saying she knew well
where he was, and it wasn't in heaven or hell or purgatory either. She
probably believed that a log of wood was left behind in his place, but
so bewitched that it seemed the dead body of her husband.

She is dead now herself, but many still living remember her. She was,
I believe, for a time a servant or else a kind of pensioner of some
relations of my own.

Sometimes those who are carried off are allowed after many years--
seven usually--a final glimpse of their friends. Many years ago a woman
vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her
husband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he received
word in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured by
faeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longing
to see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to the
peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being a
dutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets of
Glasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She was
happy, she said, and had the best of good eating, and would he not eat?
and therewith laid all kinds of food on the table; but he, knowing well
that she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faery
food, that she might keep him with her, refused and came home to his
people in Sligo.

Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond,
a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the
Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild
duck. Out of this lake, as from the white square stone in Ben Bulben,
issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one of
them raised a cry that he saw his