A Harvest of Irish Folk-Lore 331 



she throws it into the fire. "That moment the 

 eleven brothers made eleven pairs of tongs of them- 

 selves; their father, the old Gruagach, was the 

 twelfth pair. The twelve jumped into the fire to 

 know in what spark of it would they find the old 

 fisherman's son ; and they were a long time work- 

 ing and searching through the fire, when out flew 

 a spark, and into the barrel. The twelve made 

 themselves men, turned over the barrel, and spilled 

 the wheat on the floor. Then in a twinkling they 

 were twelve cocks strutting around. They fell to, 

 and picked away at the wheat, to know which one 

 would find the fisherman's son. Soon one dropped 

 on one side, and a second on the opposite side, 

 until all twelve were lying drunk from the wheat." 



One seems to see the gleam in the corner of the 

 eye and the pucker in the Gaelic visage of the old 

 narrator. To be sure, it was the wheat. It could n't 

 have been the mountain dew ; it never is. Well, 

 when things had come to this pass, the spark that 

 was the fisherman's son just turned into a fox, 

 and with one smart bite he took the head off the 

 old Gruagach, and the eleven other boozy cocks he 

 finished with eleven other bites. Then he made 

 himself the handsomest man in Erin, and married 

 the princess and succeeded to the crown. 



There is a breezy freshness about these tales, 



