Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/332

 324 said, "we shall have the blackest of trouble if you ever tell what you know of me." Then she promised by all that was good to keep a quiet tongue about him; and she held to her word. Whenever her mother and sisters began to wonder and to ask, she put them off with one thing or another, so that when she took her second boy home with her she left them no wiser than they were before.

Well, the next year another child was coming, and then she had just the same tale to her husband: she must go back to her mother, she could not bide away from her.

"If you will, why you will," said the man, "but remember what will come of it if you speak;" and then, though it went sorely against him, he let her and the children go.

This time, do as she would, her mother and sisters gave her no peace; they were fairly bursting with curiousness to know the far-end of her husband's comings and goings; and at last, on the day her third boy was born, they plagued her so much with their inquisitiveness that she could not hold out, and just told them the truth of it. Well, when evening drew on, she thought her husband would be coming to see the child, but the sunset went by, and the dusk went by, and the night went by, without a sight or sign of him. Then, after that, days and days slipped past, but still he stayed away.

When she was up and about again she grew that sick of waiting and waiting, that she took her bairns with her and set off to seek him.....

[Here the story is defective. I believe the wife returned to her husband's house, and, finding it desolate, wandered out into the world in search of him, meeting with adventures analogous to those which befel the heroine of the Leitrim legend. My memory takes up the tale at the point where she is endeavouring to release her husband from the spell which prevents him recognising her.]

So she sat down outside his door, combing her hair, and sang:—