Legendary fictions of the Irish Celts

6 Fictions of tJie Irish Celts.
under him. "Thank you, Jack," says he, when he was
out on the hard road ; " I'll do as much for you another
time. Where are you going ? "' " Faith, I'm going to
seek my fortune till harvest comes in, God bless it !
"And if you like," says the ass, " I'll go along with you ;
who knows Avhat luck we may have " " ! With all my
heart ; it's getting late, let us be jogging."
Well, they were going through a village, and a Avhole
army of gorsooiis'^ were hunting a poor dog with a kittle
tied to his tail He ran up to Jack for protection, and
the ass let such a roar out of him, that the little thieves
took to their heels as if the oii/d boy (the devil) was after
them. " More power to you. Jack I" says the dog. " I'm
much obleeged to you : where is the basie\ and yourself
going?" "We're going to seek our fortune till harvest
" !
And wouldn't I be proud to go with you
comes in."
says the dog, " and get shut (rid) of them ill conducted
boys ; /wj-//?«>/' to 'em ! " "Well, well, throw your tail
over your ann, and come along."
They got outside the town, and sat down under an old
wall, and Jack pulled out his bread and meat, and shared
with the dog ; and the ass made his dinner on a bunch
of thistles. While they were eating and chatting, what
should come by but a poor half-starved cat, and the
moU-roKi he gave out of him would make your heart
ache. " You look as if you saw the tops of nine houses
since breakfast," says Jack; "here's a bone and some-
* Garfons, boys. In the counties of the Pale, the earliest colonised
by the English, several Norman-French words and expressions, long
obsolete in England, may still be heard.
+ We are anxious in the expressions put into the mouths of
the characters to preserve the idiom, but not always to inflict the
pronunciation on the reader. English youths and maidens are requested
to recollect that the ^f in the final ittg is seldom sounded;
that ea and ei get the sound of a in ran' ; that dr and tr are pronounced
dhr and tlir, and der and tcr, when not in the first syllable
of a word, are sounded dher and ther. The Irish peasant never errs
in tjje pronunciation of ie. So the reader may set down any sketch
or stor)' in which he finds praste, bdave, thafi, as the composition of
one thoroughly ignorant of Irish pronunciation or phraseology.
"