Well, when they had ate all they could, the woman began to say she would look what was under that board. ‘Do not,’ says the man, ‘and the King after telling you not to touch it.’ ‘Sorra fear he to know of it,’ says she. But he wouldn’t let her do it that night or the next night, but the third night she put out her hand and rose up the board, and out ran the mouse. And they tried to catch it, but you may believe they were not able to come up with it. And so when the King saw they had the board shifted, he turned them out of the palace and they were as poor as before. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NOTE. I have not changed a word in these stories as they were told to me, but having heard some of them in different versions from different old people, I have sometimes taken a passage or a phrase from one and put it in another where it seemed to fit. _The Seven Fishers_ for instance, the beginning of which I have given as told by the old man of a hundred years, drifted into the adventures of _Shawneen_ and of _The Bullockeen_, and I took another ending for it; and the story of _Shawneen_, begun in a workhouse, was continued at my own door by a piper from County Kerry. I have only once, in _The Seven Fishers_, taken a few sentences from a story told, not to me, but to another. I tell this, because folk-lorists in these days are expected to be as exact as workers at any other science. As to the substance of the stories, there is a hint in _Shawneen_ of Perseus and Andromeda, and in _The Three Sons_ of the Garden of the Hesperides, and of Eden itself in _The Curious Woman_. And who can say whether these have travelled from east to west, or from west to east, for the barony of Kiltartan, in common with at least three continents, holds fragments of the wonder tales told in the childhood of the world. A. G. Printed by Maunsel & Co., Ltd., Dublin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Transcriber’s Notes The full-page illustrations from the original text have been placed into the text. The page numbers in the list of illustrations are those in the original text and may not reflect where the illustrations are placed in this version. This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. Itemized changes from the original text: