Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/361

 Folk-Talcs from Western Irelaiid. 329

up wild with the grief and said she would find out if it was her child that was in it. And she ran back all the way to the churchyard and began tearing open the grave, liut she had not worked long when a great wind blew from the grave and flung up her clothes over her face, so with that she got afraid and went home. And three months after that there did die a cousin of her own, and she said he must be buried in the same grave as the child, that she might open the coffin and see if it was her child that was in it. So they buried the cousin in the one grave, and when they took the lid off the little coffin what did they get but the black head of an old man with a mouthful of black teeth, and the child had but one little tooth. Many a time Tommy O'Donnell's old mother would tell me this, and the tears would be running down her face."

To Eat Salt after a Fairv-stroke keep.s You

FROM REING TaKEN.

Biddy Lavan told me that returning once in the evening from the town of Swinford she met "the/z^^rz." "I went into a house at Treenabauntrigh. I had to pass down the borin back by Tim Doyle's, and it was not dark when I left- the house, but I took the sacred coal with me. I could see my way well, but I thought the sacred coal would be com- pany. When I got down in the borin I seen a horse grazing in the dyke one side of me. I was sure it was someone's horse feeding there, and I kept on walking till I was past the dyke. Then there came the leap of four hoofs on the road right at my back, and I thought the horse had me and I was swallowed up. I let a big cry, and looked back, but I had the sense left in me to look over my right shoulder and not over the left, and there I seen the horse in the same place in the dyke. I had a great sweat break over me, and what with the trembling I don't know how I kept going till I got to my mother's house. And as soon as my