In Clare and Galway, the favorite amusement of the Leprechawn is riding a sheep or goat, or even a dog, when the other animals are not available, and if the sheep look weary in the morning or the dog is muddy and worn out with fatigue, the peasant understands that the local Leprechawn has been going on some errand that lay at a greater distance than he cared to travel on foot. Aside from riding the sheep and dogs almost to death, the Leprechawn is credited with much small mischief about the house. Sometimes he will make the pot boil over and put out the fire, then again he will make it impossible for the pot to boil at all. He will steal the bacon-flitch, or empty the potato-kish, or fling the baby down on the floor, or occasionally will throw the few poor articles of furniture about the room with a strength and vigor altogether disproportioned to his diminutive size. But his mischievous pranks seldom go further than to drink up all the milk or despoil the proprietor’s bottle of its poteen, sometimes, in sportiveness, filling the bottle with water, or, when very angry, leading the fire up to the thatch, and then startling the in-mates of the cabin with his laugh as they rise, frightened, to put out the flames. To offset these troublesome attributes, the Leprechawn is very domestic, and sometimes attaches himself to a family, always of the "rale owld shtock," accompanying its representatives from the castle to the cabin and never deserting them unless driven away by some act of insolence or negligence, "for, though he likes good atin’, he wants phat he gets to come wid an open hand, an’ ’ud laver take the half av a pratee that’s freely given than the whole av a quail that’s begrudged him." But what he eats must be specially intended for him, an instance being cited by a Clare peasant of a Leprechawn that deserted an Irish family, because, on one occasion, the dog having left a portion of his food, it was set by for the Leprechawn. "Jakers, ’t was as mad as a little wasp he was, an’ all that night they heard him workin’ away in the cellar as busy as a nailer, an’ a sound like a catheract av wather goin’ widout saycin’. In the mornin’ they wint to see phat he’d been at, but he was gone, an’ whin they come to thry for the wine, bad loock to the dhrop he’d left, but all was gone from ivery cask an’ bottle, and they were filled wid say-wather, beways av rayvinge o’ phat they done him."