Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/177

Rh on this point he went back to the minister, and to keep the baby wann he slipped it into his coat-sleeve, tying up the mouth of the sleeve with a string. But as he walked the string came off, the baby fell out, and slipped into a snow-wreath. Not till he was in church did the Assynt man discover his mistake. "I am very sorry," he said, "but not a bit of Kenneth have I got now."—(N.B. No wise person names an unbaptised infant; it is unlucky, and this infant died in the snow.)

The Assynt man once went as far as Tain to buy meal. A man overtaking him asked him what o'clock it was. "Well, last time it was twelve; but if it is striking still it must be nearly twenty."

He carried two bags full of cheese to market one day. One bag broke, and the cheese rolling fast down hill testified to a power of locomotion on their part which he was sorry not to have found out sooner, as they were very heavy. He, therefore, opened the second bag, and sent its contents after the first ones, walking on himself to market. He was surprised, as he said, not to find his cheeses. He waited all day, and then consulted his mother, who advised him to look for them at the bottom of the hill. There, to his great joy, he found them all.

On seeing a hare for the first time he took it for a witch, and while repeating the Lord's Prayer he backed from it. Unluckily he backed into a pond, and there, but for his wife's help, he must have been drowned.

[Assynt is spoken of in Sutherland as Beotia was spoken of in Thebes. But the Greeks had a tale of a stupid man who, when asked if his house was a good one, brought one of its stones as a sample.

In Germany a certain "Kördel" and "Michel" are remarkable for their stupidity, and make just such mistakes as the Assynt man perpetrated.]

xvii.—.

The last of the giants lived among the Fearn hills, Ross-shire, and within sight of the windows of Skibo. He had an only daughter, married, not to a giant, but to a common man. His son-in-law did