Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/230

168 "I did not kill your hound," says the daughter, "and I cannot tell you who killed him."

"I will make you tell me," says the king.

He took the daughter with him to a great wood, and he hanged her on a tree, and then he cut off the two hands and the two feet off her, and left her in a state of death. When he was going out of the wood there went a thorn into his foot, and the daughter said: "That you may never get better until I have hands and feet to cure you."

The king went home, and there grew a tree out of his foot, and it was necessary for him to open the window, to let the top of the tree out.

There was a gentleman going by near the wood, and he heard the king's daughter a-screeching. He went to the tree, and when he saw the state she was in, he took pity on her, brought her home, and when she got better, married her.

At the end of three quarters (of a year), the king's daughter had three sons at one birth, and when they were born, Granya Öi came and put hands and feet on the king's daughter, and told her, "Don't let your children be baptised until they are able to walk. There is a tree growing out of your father's foot; it was cut often, but it grows again, and it is with you lies his healing. You are under an oath not to tell the things you saw your stepmother doing to anyone but to three who were never baptised, and God has sent you those three. When they will be a year old bring them to your father's house, and tell your story before your three sons, and rub your hand on the stump of the tree, and your father will be as well as he was the first day."

There was great wonderment on the gentleman when he saw hands and feet on the king's daughter. She told him then every word that Granya Oi said to her.