Part 5

When she had too much she wasn’t pleased till she got more, and so she couldn’t keep it and had nothing at all left her in the heel of the hunt.

I suppose it was God that made the provision within in the tree. For the man was holy. Did he mind seeing his children turned into chickens? He did not. He was a born saint, and it is likely it was a saint talked with him abroad at the tree; and he had full and plenty while he lived; and the day he died the gates of heaven were open, and it was as a white pigeon that he went in through them. That now is a true story, and that is a thing that surely happened.

THE GOATS

There was a girl had a sweetheart that was called Shawn Shamus. And through the crying of the Banrighean-na-breena he was brought away into a forth. The girl went to the forth looking for him, and outside of it she saw the Banrighean, the Queen, sitting and she combing her hair, and having a blue dress on her like those flowers that grow in the fields. ‘Will you give me back Shawn Shamus?’ says the girl. ‘I will not,’ says the Queen. And she went on talking for a while, the girl asking and the Queen refusing. And at the last the Queen said: ‘I will give him to you if you will bring me a hundred barrels of six-penny money, a hundred fillies all of the one colour, a hundred spotted cows, a hundred ganders and a fleet of geese; a hundred slips and a hundred pigs, a hundred goats that are without damage or roguery.’ So the girl went looking for all those, and she brought every one of them to the Queen of the forth except the goats, for she could not get one that was honest, they are all full of roguery. Everything else but the goats she brought. So the Queen gave up Shawn Shamus, and they married and lived happy.

THE CURIOUS WOMAN

There will be no eating in the other world, says the red-haired man sitting at the door. ‘But there is a tree in it with twelve sorts of fruit, and what would that be for if we were not to eat it?’ Well, the first man that went eating fruit made a bad hand of it. He bethought of himself and it going down, and it stopped in his throat and gave us that lump in it ever since. Isn’t that a terrible thing for a man to have? But as to the woman, what she ate stopped down, and so it would if she ate another along with it. Women are terrible for eating things. Women are curious, and that is what led her to it. And besides that it was nice-looking, and women like to have nice things. A woman to see a lady, she would want all she would be wearing for herself—red stockings and shoes and dresses, and even to umbrellas.

There was an old couple were past working and they went travelling the roads, and they met a King that had a palace he had no use for, and he said they could have the use of it. So he brought them in and put them into a big room, and there was a big table with every sort of food on it, and he bade them use what they could of what was there. But there was a board of the table he bade them not to touch, and the reason was he had put a mouse under it that would tell him every word they would say.

Well, when they had ate all they could, the woman began to say she would look what was under that board. ‘Do not,’ says the man, ‘and the King after telling you not to touch it.’ ‘Sorra fear he to know of it,’ says she. But he wouldn’t let her do it that night or the next night, but the third night she put out her hand and rose up the board, and out ran the mouse. And they tried to catch it, but you may believe they were not able to come up with it. And so when the King saw they had the board shifted, he turned them out of the palace and they were as poor as before.

NOTE.

I have not changed a word in these stories as they were told to me, but having heard some of them in different versions from different old people, I have sometimes taken a passage or a phrase from one and put it in another where it seemed to fit. _The Seven Fishers_ for instance, the beginning of which I have given as told by the old man of a hundred years, drifted into the adventures of _Shawneen_ and of _The Bullockeen_, and I took another ending for it; and the story of _Shawneen_, begun in a workhouse, was continued at my own door by a piper from County Kerry. I have only once, in _The Seven Fishers_, taken a few sentences from a story told, not to me, but to another. I tell this, because folk-lorists in these days are expected to be as exact as workers at any other science.

As to the substance of the stories, there is a hint in _Shawneen_ of Perseus and Andromeda, and in _The Three Sons_ of the Garden of the Hesperides, and of Eden itself in _The Curious Woman_. And who can say whether these have travelled from east to west, or from west to east, for the barony of Kiltartan, in common with at least three continents, holds fragments of the wonder tales told in the childhood of the world.

A. G.

Printed by Maunsel & Co., Ltd., Dublin

Transcriber’s Notes

The full-page illustrations from the original text have been placed into the text. The page numbers in the list of illustrations are those in the original text and may not reflect where the illustrations are placed in this version. This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text.

Itemized changes from the original text:

• Frontispiece: Added hyphen in “HE CAME DOWN SPREAD-LEGS” to match Table of Illustrations and reference in text. • Dedication: Added missing period after “R” in “R. G. G.” • p. 19: Supplied missing closing quotation mark after “…that is in that wood.” • p. 21: Supplied missing word “do” in “…all he had to do was to…” • p. 48: Changed “neek” to “neck” and supplied missing apostrophe in “hound’s” in “…that was around the hound’s neck…” • p. 48: Supplied missing closing quotation mark after “…till I know what is happening to Shawneen.” • p. 56: Changed “ocmmands” to “commands” in “And she laid commands on the King.” • p. 60: Changed comma to period at end of paragraph after “…she went home to her mother.” • p. 65: Changed “be” to “he” in “…he cut off as he was bade…” • p. 66: Changed “its” to “it’s” in “…it’s lonesome to be housekeeping alone.” • p. 96: Changed “a young” to “as young” in “…he got young again, a young as his own son.”