Legendary fictions of the Irish Celts

Witchcraft, Sorcery, Ghosts, and Fetches. 159
travelled all day, and dickens a bit o' me was the nearer
to get a sarvice ; and when the dark hour come I got a
lodging in a little house by the side of the road, where
they were drying flax over a roaring turf fire. I'll never
belie the vanithee her goodness. She give me a good
quarter of well-baked barley bread, with butter on it, and
made me sit on the big griddle over the ash-pit in the
corner ; but what would you have of it 'I I held the
bread to the fire to melt the butter, and bedad the butter
fell on the lighted turf, and there it blazed up like
vengeance, and set the flax afire, and the flax set the
tatch afire, and maybe they didn't get a fright. " Oh,
musha, vanithee," says they, " wasn't it the divel bewitched
you to let that omadhan of a girl burn us out of
house and home this way % Be off", you torment, and
purshuin' to ! you " Well, if they didn't hunt me out,
and throw potsticks, and tongses, and sods o' fire after
me, lave it till again ; and I run, and I run, till I run
head foremost into a cabin by the side of the road.
The woman o' the house was sitting at the fire, and
she got frightened to see me run in that way. " Oh,
musha, ma'am," says I, " will you give me shelter " % and
so I up and told her my misfortunes. " Poor colleen,"
says she, " my husband is out, and if he catches a stranger
here he'll go mad and break things. But I'll let you get
up on the hurdle over the room, and for your life don't
budge." " I won't," says I, " and thank you, ma'am."
Well, I was hardly in bed when her crooked disciple of a
man kem in with a sheep on his back he was afther
stealing. "Is everything ready?" says he. "It is,"
says she. So with that he skinned the sheep, and popped
a piece down into the biling pot, and went out and hid
the skin, and buried the rest o' the mate in a hole in the
flure, and covered it with the griddle, and covered the
griddle again with some o' the clay he removed from the
flure. Well, when he made his supper on the mutton he
says to his wife, " I hope no one got lodging while I was
away." " Arrah, who'd get it 1 " says she. "That's not