Up the Country: A Saga of Pioneering Days

Mrs Piper remained in a precarious condition for weeks. She was tenderly nursed and housed by the Brennans, and the, children throve in their hospitable surroundings. But their reward to their saviours was to afflict both the Saunders and Brennans not only with a scourge of sandy blight, but also with the measles. Poor Mrs Brennan, in her fifty-first year, became so ill that Mrs Mazere had to go over to The Gap to pull her through.

The measles, even as the Piper baby, smote inopportunely. Mrs Brennan was a devout Catholic and had long looked forward to a district rally of those of her creed, to be conducted by Father O'Kennedy whose family and her own had been neighbours hack in County Clare. Father O'Kennedy arrived just after Mrs Brennan's crisis had passed, and when Mary and Bridgit were sickening.