Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/334

 326 found in the fifth chapter of Mary Hallock Foote's tale, "The Last Assembly Ball," in The Century Magazine, 1889, p. 788. The story is there quoted from a fairy-legend, originally related by an Irish woman from County Tyrone, and is adapted by the person to whom she is supposed to have recounted it, so as to serve as an illustration of a situation in the novel.

This episode in the bull's career is as follows:—

Well, once there was a king who had six beautiful daughters; and in one room of the palace stood the wishing-chair on a dais, with a curtain before it, and on her sixteenth birthday each of the princesses, in turn, was allowed to sit in the wishing-chair and wish the wish of a lifetime. The youngest princess was a mad-cap. She made fun of the stupid old chair, and of her sisters' wishes. .... She said, when her turn came she would wish a wish that would show what the old chair could do.

There was a prince in that county of Ireland very wealthy and powerful, and he was bewitched, so that he was obliged to spend half his time roaming the country in the shape of a terrible wild roan bull, and he was called the Roan Bull of Orange. Now, the youngest princess, w^hen she got into the chair .... wished .... that she might be the bride of the Roan Bull of Orange, and then she flew out of the chair .... and said it was all nonsense—the chair was as deaf as a post, and the Roan Bull would never hear of her wish.

However, he came that night, trampling and bellowing about the house, and demanded the princess. The princess went and hid behind her mother's bed. They took the daughter of the hen-wife instead, and dressed her up in the princess's clothes ....; and when the Bull had carried her on his back across the hills and valleys to his castle, he gave her an ivory wand, and charged her, on her life, to tell him what she would do with it, and she sobbed out she would "shoo" her mother's hens to roost with it. So