Page:West Irish folk-tales and romances - William Larminie.djvu/232

 200 day that he killed the piast, and you are the man whom I will marry.”

He was seven nights and seven days at feast and festival, and they were married on the eighth day. They spent that night part in talking and part in story-telling; till the early day came and the clear brightness on the morrow morning.

He said to her that he would be riding in the morning on the pony; and he was going, and he came on an apple of gold upon the strand, and the pony told him not to take up the apple or it would give him abundance of trouble.

“Whatever trouble it may give me I will take it up!”

He went home and the pearl of gold with him. In the morning he went to the old druid, and the old druid told him that it was the daughter of a king of the eastern world, who lost it from her hair;—that there was a pearl of gold on every rib of hair upon her head, and that she and her twelve attendant women were bathing in such a place the day she lost it.

“I will never stop,” said he, “till I see the woman who lost it.”

The pony told him she was hard to see.

“There are seven miles of hill on fire to cross before you come to where she is, and there are seven miles of steel thistles, and seven miles of sea for you to go over. I told you to have nothing