Irish Customs and Beliefs by Kevin Danaher

Author:Kevin Danaher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mercier Press

THE HUNGRY GRASS

In making the bargain with their employers the servant boys and girls in our part of the country always claimed certain days as holidays and foremost among these were the three days of the big autumn race meeting in Listowel. It so happened that an honest boy who was working for a farmer from the Knockanure side borrowed his master’s horse and car and jogged along to the races, by Gortagleanna and Bolton’s Cross and down Church Street to the square where hundreds were gathered, some of them making their way to the Island racecourse, some of them doing the sideshows. There was plenty to look at and all sorts of ways to spend your money, between the lemonade and the gingerbread, the seagrass, the pies and the ported, the thimbleriggers, the trick-o’-the-loop and the three-card men. And the biggest crowd of all was out in the middle of the square, with their eyes as wide as saucers and every ‘Sabhála Dia sinn!’ out of them with the wonder. The boy from Knockanure couldn’t make out what was going on at all; he stood up in the cart on top of the sack of hay he had brought for the horse. ‘Yerra, what looking have ye?’ said he, ‘and nothing to be seen except an ould cock and he tied to a traithnín of straw!’ ‘Excuse me, boy, but would you take a shilling for the sop of hay? My pony hadn’t a bite since last night,’ says the man with the cock. The bargain was made and the bag of hay passed out of the cart. And there was the wonder, for when the boy looked again, wasn’t the cock pulling a huge beam of a tree after him? Magic, of course, put in the eyes of the crowd by the man with the cock, and he was quick to see that there was a four-leafed shamrock in the beartán of hay; he knew well, of course, that the person who holds a four-leafed shamrock is immune from charms and spells affecting the eyesight.

If the four-leafed shamrock was lucky, the hungry grass was quite the opposite, and very unlucky indeed was he who trod on it. I well remember the night when a small brother was nearly frightened out of his life by a bearded apparition loudly groaning at the window; this turned out to be an elderly person known as Dan the Cabbage (so called from his selling of cabbage plants), who had on this occasion been overcome with weakness and had barely the strength to reach the lighted window. A little food and a hot drink revived him, and he told us how he had been walking across the fields as fresh and lively as ever he had been, when he stepped on the hungry grass and on the instant was struck with a hunger so violent that he almost fell down and died on the spot. So it is with the hungry grass. It

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