Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/330

 THE GLASS MOUNTAIN.

HE following imperfect variant of The Glass Mountain was related to me when I was a child by a rough, illiterate, farmhouse servant, a native of Brigg in North Lincolnshire, or of one of the adjacent villages. The story has no point of resemblance with any of our local folk-beliefs, so, I imagine, the girl heard it from a member of the colony of Irish labouring people at Brigg, an opinion which is confirmed by the fact that she told the tale with an air of great reserve and mystery, as something particularly extraordinary and uncanny, cautioning me never to “let on” that I was acquainted with it, which she would scarcely have thought of doing had one of our own commonplace traditions of boggard, ghost, or wizard been in question.

The legend ran in this fashion:

A very long time back, I don’t know how long, there was a woman who lived in a lone cottage with her three daughters. Well, one evening when it was getting on to dusk, a man knocked at the door and asked if he could not spend the night there, as he had come a long way, and no other shelter was near at hand. The woman did not much like taking a stranger in, but hers was the only house for miles round, so she could not very well turn him away; and the end of it was she let him lie down by the fire. Then, when morning came, nothing would do for him but he must have the youngest of the three daughters for his wife; and the lass, she liked his looks well enough, so it was settled that way. They were married, and he