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.