After the three brothers went home, they lived together in the house. And the Robineen had told the youngest brother to go where there was a holly-bush in the garden and to root around it. So they went out and rooted around it, and what they found was a crock of gold, and they brought it away with them. There was a little flag, now, in the top of the crock, and the flag was left aside on the grass. It happened there came after a while a poor scholar walking the road, and he took notice of the little slab, and that there was writing on it. And he was able to read the writing, and it is what it said: ‘The other side is as lucky as this side.’ So he showed that to the brothers, and they went rooting the other side, and what did they find but two more crocks of gold, the way there was one apiece for them. So there were no richer farmers in the country than those three brothers, and they got gold and divided it and scattered it. And that is a nice story and a wonderful story, and a true thing that fell out. And Lofarey, the man that told it to me, said it was a true story, and that his own father told him he was speaking to the poor scholar that read the flag. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE BALL OF THREAD There was a young lady one time, and a young boy came to her to ask her to marry him. He gave her a pound ball of thread, and bade her to leave it on the ground, and to take the end of the thread in her hand, and when the end of it would be run out, to stamp her foot on the ground and she would come to him. So she bought a shilling’s worth of bread and a shilling’s worth of apples, and she took the ball of thread as he told her. And when she stamped her foot a door opened in the ground before her, and she went in, and all she saw in the room was a dog and a cat. So she divided the bread and the apples between them, and she gave them halves, and they were more than proud to eat that much of Ireland’s bread, which they didn’t get the taste of for two hundred years before. They showed her then a store of a room where there were fifty of her sort that were after being beheaded, and gold rings on their hands. For the man was an enchanted man, and he had brought them away the same as he did herself. The cat and the dog said as she proved so well, they would hide her before she’d be in danger, for she accommodated them so well with everything. They rose up the flag that was in the fireplace, and they hid her there under it, and when the man came in the man asked did such a one come in, and they said, ‘No.’ When he went to rest himself they opened the door and let her out, and he awoke and told the cat to ask who came in at the door. The cat made him an answer, she said: ‘No one but the dog, that struck against it.’