Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/130

 1 1 8 Collectanea.

horseback was reading his office, and he had the reins thrown loose on the horse's neck, when he was passing by an iron gate into a field where there was a large number of cattle. Then the gate got a great rattle, and the horse shied and nearly threw him off. So he went back to the gate to see what it was as frightened the horse, and he saw a small keg rolling out into the road. So he got off his horse to examine the keg, and he found inside of it a small woman and the keg filled with butter. So he threatened to kill this woman if she didn't tell him where she got the butter. So she told him the whole truth, and told him of all the neighbours around that she'd taken the butter from. So he promised he wouldn't say a word about it if she'd promise to return the butter to the people she'd been after taking it from, and all the money she'd ever got for stolen butter, and she said she would, and that the money was hidden under a rafter in the thatch o' her house.

10. The Breeches full of Butter.

The police in Killbarrack, near Bunmahon, were coming in of a morning after a patrol, and they sat down in the ditch to take a smoke. And they saw a little object, — legs and a little body and no head, — running along through the field. So one of them fired at it, and it fell, and when they went to see what it was, what should it turn out to be but a man's breeches full of butter !

II. How Patsy Crotty saw the Sluaigh Modelligo.

Sluaigh Modelligo is supposed to come out on Saturday evenings and play football and hurling on the Big Inch, which is a field near Modelligo, and that field is never cultivated and nothing grown on it, for the Sluaigh would put blights on it. They have other meeting places as well, and one of them is the Poll a mhdna (as means "turf hole."). Sluaigh Modelligo is the strongest Sluaigh in Ireland as they say. The words mean that they are the dead people of Modelligo. An old man used to have a house as was on this field, the Big Inch, and he used to hear their hurling sticks be butting up against the walls of his house, and their footballs would be knocking against them, and he was in dread of his life of them. Patsy Crotty of Knock na