There were very haunted people in the old times in Ireland, used to be
bewitching one another. A living class of people they were, but it was
by magic they did it.
There was a man going to the north from Mayo to sell a horse, and he was
riding the horse, and the foal after them. And over beyond the wall he
saw a hare running, and two black hounds hunting it. And when they came
to him, the hare made a leap into his arms, and he drove away the
hounds, and put it down again safe among the rocks. He went on then to
the north for to sell the horse, but if he did, in the night it was
stole from him.
So he went back to Mayo to see would he find it, and he was walking
through the day, and when the night came he met with a house, and he
went into it like any countryman might, to ask would he get a clean
lodging. And there was in the house a very nice-looking young woman, and
he asked could he get a lodging. ‘And why wouldn’t you get it?’ says
she. ‘And more than that,’ she says, ‘I’ll call in the husband, and
he’ll go find the horse you have lost and the foal. And you don’t know
me,’ she says; ‘but I am the woman you saved, and that had been turned
into a hare, and for sixteen years I was away in that shape.’
So she did what she promised, and he was deserving of it; for wouldn’t
another man have kept the hare when he got it, but something stuck in
him that he didn’t. And wasn’t it a terrible thing in those times that
women could be turned into hares? And it was only a black hound could
come up with them.
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