Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/128

 1 16 Collectanea.

6. The Fairy Linen.

There was an old woman that had three sons, and she lived in a place (as was in Donegal) where there was any amount of Chitharacdns to be seen. Well, one morning, when she was after getting up, she went down into the garden, and she found three shirts that just fitted the three boys lying on a bush in the garden. So she examined the shirts, and she had never seen any material like them before. Well, she was impatient to show them to some- body, so the next woman that came into the house she showed them to her. So the rumour went out about the shirts, for, when one woman will hear a thing, she'll tell it round to every other woman around. -So the .whole country round came to see the shirts, and nobody had ever seen anything like them before. So the clergyman at last came to see .the shirts. " Well," says he, "you're in for luck," says he, " unless you've lost it through some fault of ye," says he. "Why?" says she. "What am I after doing?" "Well, I'm afraid," says he, "ye have no right to expose the matter to yer neighbours," says he. Well, she waited for years for her luck, but it was clean gone, where she had the foolishness to expose the secret ; and maybe she is still waiting !

7. The Fireside Visitors.

I was one night in a house where they had all gone to a wake and the man and the woman were sitting at the fire, and a little-een man came out of the corner, and he had a pipe in his hand. And the woman got afeared, — she got in dread of him, ye know, — when she saw the small little-een thing coming out of the corner. And a small little-een woman, smaller again than the man, came out of the ^corner, and they both lit their pipes and had a smoke. "Whisht," says the man, "they'll be having a smoke." The small little-een woman had a fiddle, she had, and she caught hold of the litde man and danced a double (jig) all around the floor of the house. Then they caught hold of the man and the woman, and asked them out for a dance. When they were after dancing, then they shook hands with the man and with the woman, and ran back into the corner. They ran into the corner then, and the man and the woman ran away out of the