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MAGUS

43 had got bad care in the disease. It had not the appearance of a child of seven years, being spent and sickly. It was old-fashioned enough both in look and conversation. It used to sit up on its “hunkers” at the fire like an old man. It did not appear an idiot or a “natural”. When the child had been a week in my house, I began to wish its father would provide another lodging for it. He said it was getting care enough but that he had a very good place for it. I asked where this place was. He replied “in Mick Duffy’s in Bannbrook” or “in the Shambles”, I forget which. After I shut my shop of nights, I sometimes have a crack with my husband and a neighbour. We don’t tell old stories about fairies and so on – how should I know anything about fairies? (laughter) I never said anything to the prisoner about fairies – I merely said to him that his child was “not right-looking” and that it should be with me no longer; if it had good clothes it would have been like other children. I never called it a witch. I heard my children say that when it was upstairs, it used to sing foolish little song and that it played little tricks among the ashes and was “bringing wee things” about the fire. I don’t know what “wee things” or “wee people” are. I never saw the deceased child do more than play a little trick, as if to frighten the others. I often asked the prisoner to be allowed to give the child a halfpenny- worth of bread in the day but he did not say he would permit me. I never told him the child would come to no good; but that if it got care it might thrive. He complained of it, and asked what he would do with it; and I told him he should let his sister keep it and give her a shilling a week for doing so. I swear, I never said to him that I would take off its head and throw it behind the fire. [The] Prisoner said that his sister would never get it. He had given the child its supper before he rolled it up in my apron’. Abigail Magill – ‘I lodged in Rainey’s house on the night the prisoner took the child away. After he returned, he came to my room with a candle in his left hand and asked for a drink of water. I told him where to get it and he lifted two tin-fulls with his right hand which trembled in the act. I desired him to take a drink to the child. He said he left it in the country. I never saw the child after that; but I saw its body in the infirmary, after the doctors had sent for me. There was a pearl on the right eye and two of the toes had grown together in the small-pox. To Sir T. Staples – ‘I saw the united toes of the dead body and often while it was alive’. (Witness described the clothes found on the body and said she was sure they were the same as the child had worn when alive). To Mr Blacker –‘When the prisoner told me had had left the child in the country, I had suspicions about it. I never heard quarrelling between Mrs Rainey and the [the] prisoner

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