Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/168

 160 white, her eyes were blue, and her long yellow hair fell round her as she stood in the gate. Then Diarmid said to himself that he would have her. Before the dawn of next day he had gone forth. He reached the boar's den and saw the monster lying, like a boat lies on the shore, long and broad and black. Drawing a shot from his bow he killed it on the spot. All the king's servants turned out and dragged the monster home with shouting. The king's daughter stood in the gate, like a May morning, and smiling. But the king's heart was evil, and his face grew dark. Now that the boar was dead he would go back from his word, but he dared not do so openly. So he said to Diaimid that he should not have his daughter to wife till he had measured the body of his foe, by pacing if from snout to tail, and also backwards from tail to snout.

"That," said Diarmid, "will I gladly do, and our wedding shall be on the morn's morning."

He paced the beast from the head to the tail without harm or hindrance, but in measuring it backwards the bristles pierced his bare feet, and in that night Diarmid sickened and died. His grave, beside the boar's den, may be seen in Ben Laighal to this day.

[The death of Diarmid, derived as it is from the older myths of Greece, forms the argument of a well-known Ossianic poem, and is referred to in the Ossian of the Highland Society.

The boar's-head forms the crest both of the Mac-Dermots and of the Campbell family.]

viii.—.

There lived in Dornoch in the olden time a tailor, who did not believe in witches, and who said "there was no ghosts." Now, St. Gilbert—his church—was the place where many were buried in those days that were not of the meaner of the people, and the tailor boasted that he would sew a pair of hose, alone, in that cathedral, in one night. Accordingly he took his seat, cross-legged before the high altar and plied his penetrating needle with wonderful assiduity: when lo! a human skull began to roll towards him, and spoke at last as follows: "Mo cheanna gun fiah, gun fail, aig . . . . ," viz.: "My