Blair Collection > Beside the fire

PREFACE. XXXÍX
But this touch shows that the land where he wandered
was the Celtic Hades, the country of the dead beneath
the ground, and seems to stamp the tale at once as at
least pre-Christian.
Even in such an unpretending-looking story as "The
King of Ireland's Son" (the third in this volume), there
are elements which must be vastly old. In a short
Czech story, " George with the Goat," we find some of
the prince's companions figuring, only slightly metamor-
phosed. We have the man with one foot over his
shoulder, who jumps a hundred miles when he puts it
down ; while the gun-man of the Irish story who per-
forms two parts — that of seeing and shooting — is replaced
in the Bohemian tale by two different men, one of whom
has such sight that he must keep a bandage over his
eyes, for it he removed it he could see a hundred miles,
and the other has, instead of a gun, a bottle with
his thumb stuck into it for a stopper, because if he
took it out it would squirt a hundred miles. George
hires one after the other, just as the prince does
in the Irish story. George goes to try to win the king's
daughter, as the Irish prince does, and, amongst other
things, is desired to bring a goblet of water from a well
a hundred miles off in a minute. " So," says the story,*
" George said to the man who had the foot on his
* Wratislaw's Folk-Tales from Slavonic Sources.