From that day to this there has been no cure in the well.
HOW COVETOUSNESS CAME INTO THE CHURCH.
PREFACE.
I heard this story from a workman of the late Mr. Redington Roche, of Rye Hill (in Irish, Druim an tseagail) near Monivea, Co. Galway. It was in Irish prose, but it reminded me so strongly of those strange semi-comic mediæval moralities common at an early date to most European languages—such pieces as Goethe has imitated in his poem of "St. Peter and the Horse Shoe"—that I could not resist the temptation to turn it into rhyme. I have heard a story something like this in the County Tipperary, only that it was told in English. This story is the reason (I think the narrator added) of the well-known proverbial rann:
Four clerks who are not covetous
Four Frenchmen who are not yellow,
Four shoemakers who are not liars,
Those are a dozen who are not in the country.
More than one piece of both English and French literature founded upon the same motif as this story will occur to the reader. The original will be found at p. 161 of "The Religious Songs of Connacht," vol I.
THE STORY