They all came out, and when they saw that their enemies were dead they uttered three shouts for excess of joy. They did not know then what they would do with the corpses. They gave forty tenpenny pieces to the piper and told him to throw the bodies into a hole far from the house. The piper got a lot of tinkers who were going the way and gave them ten tenpenny pieces to throw the corpse into a deep hole in a shaking-scraw a mile from the house of the friars. They took up the corpses, the piper walked out before them playing music, and they never stopped till they cast the bodies into the hole, and the shaking-scraw closed over them and nobody ever saw them since. The "Hole of the Black Boar" is to be seen still. The piper and the tinkers went to the public house, and they were drinking till they were drunk, then they began fighting, and you may be certain that the piper did not come out of Urlaur with a whole skin.
The friars built up the walls and the roof of the house and passed prosperous years in it, until the accursed foreigners came who banished the friars and threw down the greater part of the house to the ground.
The piper died a happy death, and it was the opinion of the people that he went to Heaven, and that it may be so with us all!
This story of the two women I got from Francis O'Connor. He said he heard it from one Mary Casey, a Co. Galway woman, but I don't know from what part of Galway. It is I who am responsible for the dialogue form of it, which I have used instead of putting in an occasional bald "said Mary," "said Sheela"; but it really was told more in a dramatic then a narrative form, the reciter's voice showing who was speaking. The words I have not interfered with.
I once heard a dialogue not unlike this between two Melicete Indians in Canada who fell to discussing Theology over the camp-fire at night after hunting. One was a Catholic and the other a close replica of Maurya in our dialogue.
The story of Páidin Críona seems familiar to me, but I cannot think where or in what literature I have met it before.
A hundred welcomes Sheela, it's a cure for sore eyes to see you; sit down and rest and tell us your news.
Musha! I have no news. It is not news that's troubling me.