Across the ravine the cow was seen,
But to get it she could not tell how.
“In this dilemma the Evil One appeared to her cowled as a monk, and with a rosary at his belt, and offered to cast a bridge across the chasm if she would promise him the first living being that should pass over it when complete. To this she gladly consented. The bridge was thrown across the ravine, and the Evil One stood bowing and beckoning to the old woman to come over and try it. But she was too clever to do that. She had noticed his left leg as he was engaged on the construction, and saw that the knee was behind in place of in front, and for a foot he had a hoof.
In her pocket she fumbled, a crust out tumbled,
She called her little black cur;
The crust over she threw, the dog after it flew,
Says she, ‘The dog’s yours, crafty sir!’
“Precisely the same story is told of S. Cadoc’s Causeway in Brittany; of the bridge over the Maine at Frankfort, and of many and many another.
“How comes it that we have an almost identical tale in so many parts of Europe? The reason is that in all such structures a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who haunted the place. When a storm came down on the sea, Jonah had to be flung overboard to allay it. When, in the old English ballad, a ship remained stationary, though all sails were spread, and she could make no headway, the crew ‘cast the black bullets,’ and the lot falls to the captain’s wife, and she is thereupon thrown overboard. Vortigern sought to lay the foundations of his castle in the blood of an orphan boy. A dam broke in Holland in the seventeenth century; the peasants could hardly be restrained from burying a living child under it, when reconstructed, to ensure its stability.[18]
“When the [Cistercian] monks of Strata Florida threw the daring arch over the chasm, they so far yielded to the popular superstition as to bury a dog beneath the base of the arch, or to fling one over the parapet.”