Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/121

Rh. He raised his head a second time, and he had a little green herb in his hand. "Do you see this?" said he. "Any place in Ireland that this herb grows, there be's an alt-pluachra near it, and you have swallowed an alt-pluachra."

"How do you know that?" said the sick man. "If that was so, sure the doctors would tell it to me before now."

"The doctors!" said the beggarman. "Ah! God give you sense, sure they're only a flock of omadawns. I tell you again, and believe me, that it's an alt-pluachra you swallowed. Didn't you say yourself that you felt something leaping in your stomach the first day after you being sick? That was the alt-pluachra; and as the place he was in was strange to him at first, he was uneasy in it, moving backwards and forwards, but when he was a couple of days there, he settled himself, and he found the place comfortable, and that's the reason you're keeping so thin, for every bit you're eating the alt-pluachra is getting the good out of it, and you said yourself that one side of you was swelled; that's the place where the nasty thing is living."

The sick man would not believe him at first, but the beggarman kept on talking and proving on him that it was the truth he was saying, and when his wife and daughter came back again to the house, the beggarman told them the same things, and they were ready enough to believe him.

The sick man put no faith in it himself, but they were all talking to him about it until they prevailed on him at last to call in three doctors together until he should tell them this new story. The three came together, and when they heard all the boccuch (beggarman) was saying, and all the talk of the women, it is what they laughed, and