[…] The commonest beginning of the enchantment is to meet some one not of this earth, or in league with people not of this earth, and to talk too freely to them about yourself and about your life. If they understand you and your life too perfectly, or sometimes even if they know your name, they can throw their enchantment about you. A man living at Coole near Gort says: ‘But those that are brought away would be glad to be back. It’s a poor thing to go there after this life. Heaven is the best Place, Heaven and this world we’re in now. My own mother was away for twenty-one years, and at the end of every seven years she thought it would be off her, but she never could leave the bed. She could but sit up, and make a little shirt or the like for us. It was of the fever she died at last. The way she got the touch was one day after we left the place we used to be in, and we got our choice place on the estate, and my father chose Kilchreest. But a great many of the neighbours went to Moneen. And one day a woman that had been our neighbour came over from Moneen, and my mother showed her everything and told her of her way of living. And she walked a bit of the road with her, and when they were parting the woman said: "You’ll soon be the same as such a one." And as she turned she felt a pain in the head. And from that day she lost her health. My father went to Biddy Early, but she said it was too late, she could do nothing, and she would take nothing from him.’ Biddy Early was a famous witch.

If you are taken you have always, it is said, a chance of return every seven years. Almost all that go ‘away’ among them are taken to help in their work, or in their play, or to nurse their children, or to bear them children, or to be their lovers, and all fairy children are born of such marriages. A man near Gort says: ‘They are shadows, and how could a shadow have power to move that chair or that table? But they have power over mankind, and they can bring them away to do their work.’ I have told elsewhere a man who was ‘away’ with Maive Queen of the western sidhe her lover, and made a mournful song in the Gaelic when she left him, and was mournful till he died.’