Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/266

 2 3 S Collectanea.

and it only seemed like a pair of years to him. And there was no change in him from the day he went in there, and he was quite as young as the day he had come into the lios.

Well, when he thought he had been two years there, he got anxious to see his people, and asked for to go home for to see them. So they told him that there was no one belonging to him or any trace of anybody who knew him left in the world. However, he would not be satisfied, and they had to let him go. So they gave him a pony to ride upon, and told him not to come off it, or to be letting his feet touch the ground, because, if he did, he'd be an old man again.

Well, he was coming along then near to where he had lived before, and everything was changed, and he was that surprised at it all that he was near falling off his pony. Well, he met a man on the road who was on horseback and he with a bag of wheat on his back, and the bag suddenly fell off the man's back, and he was all legs struggling to get the thing on his back again. So Fionn MacCumhall asked him was he the sort of man as was in the country now? And the man said, — "Yes, of course. What other class of men would be in the country at all ? " Then Fionn asked the man to put the bag standing on end in the road in the place where it was after falling, and it was the reason that he told him, — that he might catch hold of it and give it to the other man on the horse's back. So he did. And Fionn caught the bag, and was throwing it on to the other man's horse so that he could catch it. But he threw it too far, and threw it over the horse altogether. He got vexed and excited then, and forgot himself entirely. So he came off his pony then, and went on the ground, and he became a withered old man on the ground there and then. So the pony (as was a fairy pony) ran away from him, and ran straight back to the lios where he was after coming from.

Well, Fionn was travelling about for after a week, — a poor feeble old man, — when he met Saint Padraic. And Saint Padraic questioned him, and he told him his tale and what was after happening to him. So Saint Padraic took him home with him, and kept him in his house and fed him. But himself and Saint Padraic and Saint Padraic's housekeeper could never agree at all. And the housekeeper wouldn't be giving him enough to eat, for