“Just as we were talking a ship hove in sight, sailing so beautiful before the wind. ‘Ah, then, sir,’ said I, ‘will you drop me on the ship, if you please?’ ‘We are not fair over it,’ said he; ‘if I dropped you now you would go splash into the sea.’ ‘I would not,’ says I, ‘I know better than that, for it is just clean under us, so let me drop now at once.’

“‘If you must, you must,’ said he; ‘there, take your own way’; and he opened his claw, and, faith, he was right—sure enough, I came down plump into the very bottom of the salt sea! Down to the very bottom I went, and I gave myself up, then, for ever, when a whale walked up to me, scratching himself after his night’s sleep, and looked me full in the face, and never the word did he say, but, lifting up his tail, he splashed me all over again with the cold salt water till there wasn’t a dry stitch upon my whole carcass! And I heard somebody saying—’twas a voice I knew too—‘Get up, you drunken brute, off o’ that’; and with that I woke up, and there was Judy with a tub full of water, which she was splashing all over me—for, rest her soul, though she was a good wife, she could never bear to see me in drink, and had a bitter hand of her own.

“‘Get up,’ said she again; ‘and of all places in the parish, would no place sarve your turn to lie down upon but under the ould walls of Carrigapooka? An uneasy resting I am sure you had of it.’ And, sure enough, I had, for I was fairly bothered out of my senses with eagles, and men of the moons, and flying ganders, and whales, driving me through bogs and up to the moon, and down to the bottom of the green ocean. If I was in drink ten times over, long would it be before I’d lie down in the same spot again, I know that!”

T. Crofton Croker.


(The Birth of Cuchulain.)
n the long time ago, Conchubar, son of Ness,
was King of Ulster, and he held his court in
the palace of Emain Macha. And this is the
way he came to be King. He was but a
young lad, and his father was not living,
and Fergus, son of Rogh, who was at that
time King of Ulster, asked his mother Ness in marriage.

Now Ness, that was at one time the quietest and kindest of the women of Ireland, had got to be unkind and treacherous because of an unkindness that had been done to her, and she planned to get the kingdom away from Fergus for her own son. So she said to Fergus, “Let Conchubar hold the kingdom for a year, so that his children after him may be called the children of a king; and that is the marriage portion I will ask of you.”

“You may do that,” the men of Ulster said to him; “for even though Conchubar gets the name of being king, it is yourself that will be our King all the time.” So Fergus agreed to it, and he took Ness as his wife, and her son Conchubar was made King in his place.

But all through the year Ness was working to keep the kingdom for him, and she gave great presents to the chief men of Ulster to get them on her side. And though Conchubar was but a young lad at the time, he was wise in his judgments and brave in battle, and good in shape and in form, and they liked him well. And at the end of the year, when Fergus asked to have the kingship back again, they consulted together; and it is what they agreed, that Conchubar was to keep it. And they said, “It is little Fergus thinks about us, when he was so ready to give up his rule over us for a year; and let Conchubar keep the kingship,” they said, “and let Fergus keep the wife he has got.”