The Curious Woman
There will be no eating in the other world, says the red-haired man sitting at the door. ‘But there is a tree in it with twelve sorts of fruit, and what would that be for if we were not to eat it?’ Well, the first man that went eating fruit made a bad hand of it. He bethought of himself and it going down, and it stopped in his throat and gave us that lump in it ever since. Isn’t that a terrible thing for a man to have? But as to the woman, what she ate stopped down, and so it would if she ate another along with it. Women are terrible for eating things. Women are curious, and that is what led her to it. And besides that it was nice-looking, and women like to have nice things. A woman to see a lady, she would want all she would be wearing for herself—red stockings and shoes and dresses, and even to umbrellas.
There was an old couple were past working and they went travelling the roads, and they met a King that had a palace he had no use for, and he said they could have the use of it. So he brought them in and put them into a big room, and there was a big table with every sort of food on it, and he bade them use what they could of what was there. But there was a board of the table he bade them not to touch, and the reason was he had put a mouse under it that would tell him every word they would say.
Well, when they had ate all they could, the woman began to say she would look what was under that board. ‘Do not,’ says the man, ‘and the King after telling you not to touch it.’ ‘Sorra fear he to know of it,’ says she. But he wouldn’t let her do it that night or the next night, but the third night she put out her hand and rose up the board, and out ran the mouse. And they tried to catch it, but you may believe they were not able to come up with it. And so when the King saw they had the board shifted, he turned them out of the palace and they were as poor as before.
Note
I have not changed a word in these stories as they were told to me, but having heard some of them in different versions from different old people, I have sometimes taken a passage or a phrase from one and put it in another where it seemed to fit. The Seven Fishers for instance, the beginning of which I have given as told by the old man of a hundred years, drifted into the adventures of Shawneen and of The Bullockeen, and I took another ending for it; and the story of Shawneen, begun in a workhouse, was continued at my own door by a piper from County Kerry. I have only once, in The Seven Fishers, taken a few sentences from a story told, not to me, but to another. I tell this, because folk-lorists in these days are expected to be as exact as workers at any other science.
As to the substance of the stories, there is a hint in Shawneen of Perseus and Andromeda, and in The Three Sons of the Garden of the Hesperides, and of Eden itself in The Curious Woman. And who can say whether these have travelled from east to west, or from west to east, for the barony of Kiltartan, in common with at least three continents, holds fragments of the wonder tales told in the childhood of the world.
A. G.
Frontispiece: Added hyphen in “HE CAME DOWN SPREAD-LEGS” to match Table of Illustrations and reference in text.
Dedication: Added missing period after “R” in “R. G. G.”
p. 19: Supplied missing closing quotation mark after “…that is in that wood.”
p. 21: Supplied missing word “do” in “…all he had to do was to…”
p. 48: Supplied missing closing quotation mark after “…till I know what is happening to Shawneen.”