Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/119

Rh "Perhaps," says the beggarman, "I could find you a relief myself, if you were to tell me what's on you. They say that I be knowledgable about diseases and the herbs to cure them."

The sick man smiled, and he said: "There isn't a medicine man in the county that I hadn't in this house with me, and isn't half the cattle I had on the farm sold to pay them. I never got a relief no matter how small, from a man of them; but I'll tell you how it happened to me first." Then he gave him an account of everything he felt and of everything the doctors had ordered.

The beggarman listened to him carefully, and when he had finished all his story, he asked him: "What sort of field was it you fell asleep in?"

"A meadow that was in it that time," says the sick man; "but it was just after being cut."

"Was it wet," says the beggarman.

"It was not," says he.

"Was there a little stream or a brook of water running through it?" said the beggarman.

"There was," says he.

"Can I see the field?"

"You can, indeed, and I'll show it to you."

He rose off his chair, and as bad as he was, he pulled himself along until he came to the place where he lay down to sleep that evening. The beggarman examined the place for a long time, and then he stooped down over the grass and went backwards and forwards with his body bent, and his head down, groping among the herbs and weeds that were growing thickly in it.

He rose at last and said: "It is as I thought," and he stooped himself down again and began searching as