the brain: headache, vertigo, cramp, convulsions, palsy,
incubus, apoplexy, falling sickness."

THOMAS. It is what I bid you to tell him--that it was the falling
sickness.

ANDREW [_dropping book_]. O my dear, look at all the marks gone out of
it. Wait now, I partly remember what he said ... a blister he spoke of
... or to be smelling hartshorn ... or the sneezing powder ... or if
all fails, to try letting the blood.

FATHER JOHN. All this has nothing to do with the real case. It is all
waste of time.

ANDREW. That is what I was thinking myself, Father. Sure it was I was
the first to call out to you when I saw you coming down from the
hillside and to bring you in to see what could you do. I would have
more trust in your means than in any doctor's learning. And in case you
might fail to cure him, I have a cure myself I heard from my
grandmother ... God rest her soul ... and she told me she never knew it
to fail. A person to have the falling sickness, to cut the top of his
nails and a small share of the hair of his head, and to put it down on
the floor and to take a harry-pin and drive it down with that into the
floor and to leave it there. "That is the cure will never fail," she
said, "to rise up any person at all having the falling sickness."

FATHER JOHN [_hands on ears_]. I will go back to the hillside, I will
go back to the hillside, but no, no, I must do what I can, I will go
again, I will wrestle, I will strive my best to call him back with
prayer. [_Goes into room and shuts door._]

ANDREW. It is queer Father John is sometimes, and very queer. There are
times when you would say that he believes in nothing at all.

THOMAS. If you wanted a priest, why did you not get our own parish
priest that is a sensible man, and a man that you would know what his
thoughts are? You know well the Bishop should have something against
Father John to have left him through the years in that poor mountainy
place, minding the few unfortunate people that were left out of the
last famine. A man of his learning to be going in rags the way he is,
there must be some good cause for that.

ANDREW. I had all that in mind and I bringing him. But I thought he
would have done more for Martin than what he is doing. To read a Mass
over him I thought he would, and to be convulsed in the reading it, and
some strange thing to have gone out with a great noise through the
doorway.

THOMAS. It would give no good name to the place such a thing t