Legends of Saints & Sinners. Collected and Translated from the Irish

by Unknown

Says the priest, "don't tell me your mind," says he; "it's no good. I am wed already to Mary Mother, and I shall never have any other wife," says he. She gave him up then when she saw that it was no good for her, and she went away. There was a piece of gold plate in the house, and when the young priest fell asleep she came back again into his room, and she put the gold plate unbeknownst to him into his bag, and out she went again.

When he rose then, in the morning, he was getting himself ready to be going off again. It was a Friday, a fast day, that was in it, but she got a piece of meat and put it into his pocket, unbeknownst to him. Now he had both the meat and the gold plate in his bag, and off my poor man went, without any meal in the morning. When he had gone a couple of miles on his road, up she rose and told her father that the man that he had last night with him, "it was a bad man he was, that he stole the gold plate, and that he had meat in his pocket, going away of him, that she herself saw him eating it as he went the road that morning." Then the father got ready a horse and pursued him, and came up with him and got him taken and brought back again to his own house, and sent for the peelers.

"I thought," said he, "that it was an honest man you were, and it's a rogue you are," said he.

He was taken out then and given to the jury to be tried, and he was found guilty. The father took the gold plate out of the bag and showed it to the whole jury. He was sentenced to be hanged then. They said that any man who did a thing of that sort, he deserved nothing but to put his head in the noose[54] and hang him.

He was up on the stage then going to be hanged, when he asked leave to speak in the presence of the people. That was given him. He stood up, then, and he told all the people who he himself was, and where he was going and what he had done; how he was going home to his father and mother, and how he came into the gentleman's house. "I don't know that I did anything bad," said he, "but the daughter that this gentleman had, she came in to me, into the room, where I was asleep, and she asked me to leave the church and to marry herself, and I would not marry her, and no doubt it was she who put the gold plate and the fish into my bag," and he went down on his two knees then, and put up a petition to God to send them all light that it was not himself who was guilty.

"Oh, it was not fish that was in your bag at all but meat," said the daughter.

"It was meat perhaps that you put in it, but it was fish that I found in it," says the priest.

When the people heard that, they desired to bring the bag before them, and they found that it was fish in the place of meat that was in it. They gave judgment then to hang the young woman instead of the priest.

She was put up then in place of him to be hanged, and when she was up on the stage, going to be hanged, "Well, you devil," said she, "I'll have you, in heaven or on earth," and with that she was hanged.