Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/452

 424 Collectajiea.

often described. Bat I am not aware that the old legend which explains one of the sculptures on the covering slab has been published. At the right-hand corner at the foot of the slab a tripod cooking-pot is carved, and on its lid is a cock in the act of crowing.

The story which is given in explanation is that the Roman soldiers watching at Our Lord's sepulchre were scoffing at the possibility of His resurrection, and one of them said that it was just as possible that the fowl they were then cooking in the pot would return to life. As the word was said the lid was thrown off and the cock flew up alive and crew. (Told by the sexton of the Cathedral as an old belief.)

This is a common tradition. Dr. D. Hyde gives a poetical version of the story of the cock in his Religious Sotigs of Connacht, vol. ii. pp. 152-156, taken down from a peasant in Galway. A literal translation of the final verses runs as follows :

There was a flag in the doorway, and surely it was so firm | That a hundred men would not raise it without breaking it up | Until an angel came out of heaven, till he 'redded' the road | And till he lifted the flag out of their presence.

Mary Magdalene came hastily into it | That she might heal the wounds of Our Lord. | She searched the tomb all round about, hurriedly | And she did not get one sight of Jesus.

Until she saw the gravestones ready beside the wall | In the portion that the cover was off^ (?) it was | She asked timidly, " Are you a man or a ghost (?) | Or where have ye made the room (?) of Our Lord ? "

" I never left this place," said the guard who was watching Him, I " And I do not know who would go looking for Him | I have a small little bird of a cock boiling in this pot " | (And they making a mock of Our Lord).

" I have a small little bird of a cock boiling in the pot," | said he, mocking at Our Lord | " And until the cock rises up out of the pot I It is impossible to make a resurrection."

But up rose the cock out of the pot | He shook his two wings and put a crow out of him. | " My ochone," says the guard, and

' Owing to the bad articulation of the old man who repeated the poem some of the Irish words are uncertain.