CORNY O’SULLIVAN’S FORTUNE,
AND WHAT BECAME OF IT.
One of the chief delights of my boyhood was to make my way on a winter’s evening to Henry Driscoll’s cabin, and there, on a three-legged stool, drawn close to the turf fire, and opposite my host, who employed himself in cobbling a brogue, or making a potato-basket, to listen with “wide-mouthed wonder” to the stories of fairy, ghost, or goblin, which he poured into my attentive ear.
Henry was a labourer, employed upon my father’s farm, and he united a wonderful genius for story-telling with a firm belief in the supernatural. Of most of his own tales he was ready to swear the truth, although his own imagination had contributed the principal incidents, but any he thought unworthy of credit, to remove any doubts on the subject, he made a point of concluding thus:
“Well, there was a powerful weddin’, and I was there meself, and wud brown paper stockins and slippers of glass, here I come sliddherin’ all the ways to tell ye a whole parcel of lies.”
Long shall the old cabin find a place in my remembrance, for many, many hours of real enjoyment have I passed in its chimney corner.
Let me try to write one of Henry’s stories, as well as memory will allow, in his own words:
“Oh! if ’tis a story ye want, your honnor, that same you must have wud a heart and a half; but what I’m goin’ to tell didn’t happen to me; for barrin’ once or twice, I never seen anything worse nor meself in all me born days.
“Well, ’twas in the times (and I well remimber them meself, though I’m not so very ould) when the fairies was as thick as blackberries, and as throng as pigs in a fair, that there lived in this same sweet county of Wexford a labourin’ man of the name of Corny O’Sullivan. He was as fine, clane, clever, and soople a boy as you’d meet in a day’s walk. Corny the dancer was the title he was best known by, (for ye see his own uncle’s son