Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/517

 Rh she, siding the place. "Well, well, then, well, well, on the boghee veg [poor little thing]. What is it at all, at all, that's doin' on the millish [sweet]? Did he think Mammy had gone an' lef him then, the chree [heart]? Mammy is goin' to feed him, though."

The tailor had been thinking mighty with himself what he ought to do, so he says,—"Look here, woman, give him nothing at all, but go out and get a creelful of good turf."

She brought in the turf, and throws a big bart [bundle] of fern on it. The tailor give a leap off the table down to the floor, and it wasn't long till he had the fine fire.

"Thou'll have the house put on fire for me, Hom," says Herself.

"No fear, but I'll fire some of them," says the tailor.

The child, with his two eyes going out of his head watching to see what the tailor would do then, was slowly turning his whining howl into a kind of call,—to his own sort to come and fetch him, as like.

"I'll send thee home," says the tailor, drawing near the cradle, and he stretches out his two hands to take the child and put him on the big red turf fire. Before he was able to lay a hand on him, the lil fella leaped out of the cradle and took for the door. "The back of me han' an the sole of me fut to you!" says he, "if I would only ha' had only another night I could have showed thee a trick or two more than that yet."

Then the door flew open with a bang, as though some one had thrown it open, and he took off with himself like a shot. A hullaballoo of laughing and making fun was heard outside, and the noise of many running little feet. Out on the door of the house goes Herself, she saw no one, but she caught sight of a flock of low-lying clouds shaped like gulls chasing each other away up Glen Rushen, and then comes to her ears, as if afar off from the clouds, sharp whistles and wicked little laughs as if making mock of her. Then, as she was turning round and searching, she suddenly sees her own sweet rosy smiling child with thumb in mouth lying on the bink [stone bench] right before her. And she took all the joy in the worl' of the child that he was home again safe and sound.

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Peel, Isle of Man.