THE HORSE AND FOAL
There were very haunted people in the old times in Ireland, used to be bewitching one another. A living class of people they were, but it was by magic they did it.
There was a man going to the north from Mayo to sell a horse, and he was riding the horse, and the foal after them. And over beyond the wall he saw a hare running, and two black hounds hunting it. And when they came to him, the hare made a leap into his arms, and he drove away the hounds, and put it down again safe among the rocks. He went on then to the north for to sell the horse, but if he did, in the night it was stole from him.
So he went back to Mayo to see would he find it, and he was walking through the day, and when the night came he met with a house, and he went into it like any countryman might, to ask would he get a clean lodging. And there was in the house a very nice-looking young woman, and he asked could he get a lodging. ‘And why wouldn’t you get it?’ says she. ‘And more than that,’ she says, ‘I’ll call in the husband, and he’ll go find the horse you have lost and the foal. And you don’t know me,’ she says; ‘but I am the woman you saved, and that had been turned into a hare, and for sixteen years I was away in that shape.’
So she did what she promised, and he was deserving of it; for wouldn’t another man have kept the hare when he got it, but something stuck in him that he didn’t. And wasn’t it a terrible thing in those times that women could be turned into hares? And it was only a black hound could come up with them.