I do be so afeard of the tramps, she said to me one evening. There s nothing I fear like the thunder. I might die there alone in the cottage and no one know it. 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.