It was not long now till the red woman arrived at the place and found
both the Amadan and the cat lying side by side, dead. At this the poor
woman was frantic with sorrow, but suddenly she saw by the Amadan's
side the bottle of iocshlainte and the feather. She took them up and
rubbed the Amadan with the iocshlainte, and he jumped to his feet,
alive and well, and fresh as when he began the fight.
He smothered her with kisses and drowned her with tears. He took the
red woman with him, and set out on his journey back, and travelled and
travelled on and on till he came to the Castle of Fire.
Here he met the three young princes, who were now living happily with
no giants to molest them. They had one sister, the most beautiful
young maiden that the Amadan had ever beheld. They gave her to the
Amadan in marriage, and gave her half of all they owned for fortune.
The marriage lasted nine days and nine nights. There were nine hundred
fiddlers, nine hundred fluters, and nine hundred pipers, and the last
day and night of the wedding were better than the first.
_The Rakshas's Palace_
Once upon a time there lived a Rajah who was left a widower with two
little daughters. Not very long after his first wife died he married
again, and his second wife did not care for her stepchildren, and was
often unkind to them; and the Rajah, their father, never troubled
himself to look after them, but allowed his wife to treat them as she
liked. This made the poor girls very miserable, and one day one of
them said to the other, "Don't let us remain any longer here; come
away into the jungle, for nobody here cares whether we go or stay." So
they both walked off into the jungle, and lived for many days on the
jungle fruits. At last, after they had wandered on for a long while,
they came to a fine palace which belonged to a Rakshas, but both the
Rakshas and his wife were out when they got there. Then one of the
Princesses said to the other, "This fine palace, in the midst of the
jungle, can belong to no one but a Rakshas, but the owner has
evidently gone out; let us go in and see if we can find anything to
eat." So they went into the Rakshas's house, and finding some rice,
boiled, and ate it. Then they swept the room and arranged all the
furniture in the house tidily. But hardly had they finished doing so
when the Rakshas and his wife returned home. Then the two Princesses
were so frightened that they ran up to the top of the house and hid
themselves on the flat roof, from whence they could look down on one
side into the inner courtyard of the house, and from the other could
see the open country. The house-top was a favourite resort of the
Rakshas and his wife. Here they would sit upon the hot summer
evenings; here they winnowed the grain and hung out the clothes to
dry; and the two Princesses found a sufficient shelter behind some
sheaves of corn that were waiting to be threshed. When the Rakshas
came into the house, he looked round and said to his wife, "Somebody
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