strong--I do feel it--and I have a lightness in my head, and often
when I do be excited with the thunder I do be afeard I might die
there alone in the cottage and no one know it. But I do hope that
the Lord--bless His holy name!--has something in store for me. I've
done all I can, and I don't like going again' my mother and she
dead. And now good evening, your honour, and safe home.'

Intense nervousness is common also with much younger women. I
remember one night hearing some one crying out and screaming in the
house where I was staying. I went downstairs and found it was a girl
who had been taken in from a village a few miles away to help the
servants. That afternoon her two younger sisters had come to see
her, and now she had been taken with a panic that they had been
drowned going home through the bogs, and she was crying and wailing,
and saying she must go to look for them. It was not thought fit for
her to leave the house alone so late in the evening, so I went with
her. As we passed down a steep hill of heather, where the nightjars
were clapping their wings in the moonlight, she told me a long story
of the way she had been frightened. Then we reached a solitary
cottage on the edge of the bog, and as a light was still shining in
the window, I knocked at the door and asked if they had seen or
heard anything. When they understood our errand three half-dressed
generations came out to jeer at us on the doorstep.

'Ah, Maggie,' said the old woman, 'you're a cute one. You're the
girl likes a walk in the moonlight. Whist your talk of them big
lumps of childer, and look at Martin Edward there, who's not six,
and he can go through the bog five times in an hour and not wet his
feet.'