“Not too quick! ”says Jack, says he. “What will you give me, and I’ll save you from your mother-in-law?”
“O! I’ll give you,” says he, “anything at all, in moderation, that you ask.”
“Well,” says Jack, says he, “if you pension me, I’ll live here always, and I’ll watch by your mother-in-law’s grave every night, and keep her from rising.”
Says Donal: “If you do that, I’ll give you any. pension you ask.”
Jack asked one hundred pounds a year, and Donal agreed to it. They buried the mother-in-law the third time, and Jack worked for his pension so faithfully and so well, that she never rose more.
Donal and his wife lived middling happy, but Jack and his wife and children, with their pension of one hundred pounds a year, were the happiest family in all Ireland.
The Snow, the Crow, and the Blood
ONE day in the dead of winter, when the snow lay like a linen tablecloth over the world, Jack, the King of Ireland’s son, went out to shoot. He saw a crow, and he shot it, and it fell down on the snow. Jack went up to it, and he thought he never saw anything blacker than that crow, or redder than its blood, nor anything whiter than the snow round about.
He said to himself: “I’ll never rest till I get a wife whose hair is as black as that crow, whose cheeks are as red as that blood, and whose skin is as white as that snow.”
So he went home, and told his father and mother this. He said he was going to set off before him and look for such a girl.