Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/331

 Rh took her off home with him. A fine, big place she found his house was, with everything in it anybody could want so she thought she should do well enough there. But there was just one thing that was out of the way queer. When the grey of night-time began to come on, the man said to her: "Now, you have got to choose which way it is to be: I must take the shape of a bull either by day or by night, one or the other; how will you have it?" [See the corresponding incident in Campbell's Popular Tales of the West Highlands, vol. i, p. 63.]

"You shall be a bull by day, and a man by night," the girl answered; and so it always was. At sunrise he turned into a bull, then at sundown he was a man again.

Well, use is everything, so after a while his wife got to think as much of him as if he had been like other folks. However, when a year had gone by, and she was likely to have a bairn, she began to think long of seeing her mother and sisters again, and asked her husband to let her go home to them for her confinement. He did not like that: he was quite against it, for fear she should let out what he was. "If you ever opened your mouth to anyone about what you know, ill-luck would come of it," he said.

But still she hankered after her mother, and begged so hard that, being as she was, he could not deny her, and she got her own way.

Well, that time everything went as right as could be. The child was a boy, and fine and proud she was when her husband came to see it. The only trouble she had was that her mother and sisters were as curious as curious to find out why he never came to see her by daylight; and they had no end to their questions. So at last, when she was strong again, she was glad to go away home with him.

Still, the year after, the same thing happened again. She took such a longing to be nursed by her mother when the next bairn was to be born, that, willing or not, her husband had to let her have her liking. "But mind," he