Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/217

 Ftirther Notes frovi Cotinty Leitrini. iq<^

So the lord and his lady came home in great splendour, and their three sons with them ; and they found the old woman, who first gave Cul-corrach the dresses, had come to see her, and she said she was coming to do wrong right, only the lord had found it out.

" Now", says she, " I'll not go back till Cul-fin is killed, for she is the cause of all this." So Cul-fin was put to death.

The old woman brought the lord's wife and the three children on a visit to her cabin in a chariot, and kept them for a month, till the lord came for them, as was appointed. She gave each of the three sons as much gold as they could want, and she made a present of the chariot and the grey steed to Cul-corrach.

" Good-bye now", says she, " for you may never see me again, and I wish you and your lord all sorts of happiness to live together."

So they went home, and if they didn't live happy — that we may!

NOTES.

Source, etc. — I heard this tale from Mrs. Whelan, wife of Barney Whelan of Driny townland, co. Leitrim, who heard it many years ago from one Peter Gray of Ballyfermoy, in co. Roscommon, "who had very good Irish." He was an old man then, and is, alas ! now dead. J have given it here word for word as told me by the narrator. It follows very closely Mr. Curtin's story of " Fair, Brown, and Trembling", but the opening here is an addition thereto, and motivates the old woman's befriending of the heroine. The fire-fetching commencement is found in an Icelandic variant (No. 273 in Miss Cox's book). The three heaps of gold, silver, and copper may be compared with the gold, silver, and copper forests of some variants.

The changelings placed in the child's cradle are an addition to Curtin's version. They are to be found in one of Grimm's variants from Mecklenburg (see note 26 in Cinderella, Miss M. R. Cox), and in several early legends.

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