Page:West Irish folk-tales and romances - William Larminie.djvu/214

 182 went to the house of her half-brothers, knocked at the door, and asked them to open it. And one of the brothers said, “That is not my sister.” But another looked out of the window and saw the coat and recognised it, and he opened the door and let her in. She cut the three heads off, and took them three quarters of a mile and put them into a hole in the ground, and went back to her mother and told her she had killed the three. She gave the coat back to Gilla of the Enchantments, and Gilla went in the evening to her brothers with food, and whatever sort of fastening the other one put on the door she could not open it, but had to go in by the window, and she found her three brothers dead.

She wept and she screamed and pulled the hair from her head in her lamentations, till the whiteness of the day came upon the morrow. She had not one head of the heads to get; but she followed the trace of the blood, and three quarters of a mile from the house were they in the place where they were buried. She dug them up, and took them to her, and washed and cleaned them, as was her wont, and put them on the bodies, but down they fell. She had to take them up at last, and cry to God to do something to them, that she might see them alive. And there were made of them three water-dogs (? otters) and she made another of herself. They were going in that way for a time,