Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/194

 1 86 Leland L. Dimcan.

ing home one night, and looking in at the window of a certain house, saw an old hag sitting by the fireside with a pail between her knees, and a straw rope tied on the crook, and she milking the spit and singing, " Boneen, Boneen, Bonccn."

It is also generally asserted that if the washings from a churn are thrown into a stream which runs into a lough, and the " man-keepers" (newts) taste them, they will ever after take the butter from that house.

As touching " man-keepers", there is a tale of a man swallowing one whilst drinking water from a bog-hole» He found his appetite increase so that nothing would appease it, and at last he went to a doctor, who asked him did he ever drink water out in the fields. The man told him what he had done, and the doctor said he must have swallowed a man- keeper, and that he probably had by that time a whole family inside him. He told him he must eat a pound of salt, and not take a drop to drink, no matter what thirst was on him, and then to hold his head over a gallon of water. This he did, and the whole family jumped out one after another, and the last as big as a cat. The foolish fellow, however, kept his mouth open too long, and one jumped back again and could not be got out, and the poor man did not last long after that.i

BIRTH, MARRIAGE, DEATH.

With the exception of the tales about changelings, which I have already recited, there does not appear to be any lore connected with childbirth. In some parts of Ireland there are many precautions taken to prevent children being overlooked, but they are generally adopted before baptism. Such, if they existed in Kiltubbrid, have died out there, and the only note on this subject I have come across is, that after a child was christened it was the

^ See Dr. Hyde's Beside tJie Fire for the best version of this story.