“I have heard that you know where the witches hold their Sabbat.”
He says, “Yes.”
“To-morrow I think I should like to hear what the witches say.”
And he points out to her the hole of the lime-kiln. And at midnight all the witches came, some from one quarter, some from another—some laughing, and others cutting capers. The witches said one to another,
“We must look in the lime-kiln, to see what may be there.”
They go to look, and they find the hunchback girl, and they send her off—
“Go, go—through hedges and hedges, through thorns and thorns, through furze-bushes and furze-bushes, scratches and pricks.”
And in no way could our poor hunchback find her way home. All torn to pieces and exhausted, at last, in the morning, she arrived at her house.
Estefanella Hirigaray.
The second part of this story is evidently a blundered version, transferred from fairies to witches, of Croker’s “Legend of Knochgrafton” (“Fairy Legends of South of Ireland,” p. 10); and M. Cerquand, Part II., p. 17, has a Basque version, “Les Deux Bossus,” almost identical with this Irish legend. The tale, as given in Croker, is found in the Bearnais Gascon, in Spanish, Italian, and German. It is evident, we think, that the Basque land is not its home, but that it has travelled there. We have also another Basque variation of the first part, in which two lads hear the witches at the Sabbat say that a king’s daughter can only be cured by eating an ox’s heart. The opening of this story is so different, that we here give it:—