Folk-Tales from Western Ireland. '^'X>2>
the bull-dog by, and it stood behind the boy. With that he set the two dogs at the woman, and then there was the shrieking and the screaming down the stream. When he got the woman off the stepping-stones, he went over and ran home. The next morning he asked his father and mother if the dogs had come in. They said they had not, and that the night past they had been tearing the bed- clothes off them, trying to get out, till at last the hound jumped through the window, and the bull-dog after it. So the boy went back to the river to see what had happened, and if there were any tracks or traces of the dogs, and it was what he found but their entrails, that was all that was left of the dogs."
Perhaps the woman that grinned is Badb the war goddess.
The Buachaill Bo-aire.
Old Bridget Groah told me this story of the buachaill bo-aire.
"You never heard of buachaill bo-aire" she said, "and how his food came down to him from heaven. It came to him because, minding the cows, he could not go to Mass on Sunday. One Sunday the Almighty God came to him and told him to go to Mass, and the boy did not know it was the Almighty God that spoke to him, and this is the excuse he gave. He said that if he left them the cows would go astray as he had no one to mind them. So the Almighty God said he would mind them, and told the boy to go to Mass. The boy got ready, and put on his cota- mor, and tied a rope round his middle, and went to Mass. As soon as he was in the chapel he took off his cota-mor and threw it up across the shadow of the sun, and the shadow held it up. And everyone in the chapel thought some saint was in it. When Mass was over the boy went home to his cows. The next Sunday the Almighty God came to him again to mind his cows while he went to Mass.
