J. F. Campbell Collection > Popular tales of the West Highlands > Volume 2

236 WEST HI GHLAXD TALES.
trying to sell tliem. So they determined to serve out their tricky
neighbour, and asked him and his wife to a dance at an inn.
But Hugh tied a pudding full of blood about his wife's neck, and
covered it up with a neapagain, and when he and his wife got
up to dance a reel he put the skian ddbh, black knife, into the
pudding, and the wife fell as dead.
Then Eobhan got a horn which hunters, mointee seilge, had
at same time for the wood, and he put it to his wife, and he blew
into the horn, and the horn gave a ndadhlan, lamentable groan ;
and the wife of Hugh got up again, and she began to dance.
The neighbours bought the horn and tried feartan na h-
ADHARC, the trick of the horn, on their own wives. They killed
them, and blew, but though they were blowing still, their wives
would not get up.
Then they caught Hugh and put him in a sack, to throw him
over a fall. They went into an inn to drink beer. A drover
came past, and Hugh in the sack began, — " I am going to the
good place, I am going to the good place," etc. " Where art
thou going?" said the drover. "It is," said Hugh, " they are
going to put me where I will feel neither cold, nor weariness, nor
hunger more. I shall not feel them, nor thirst." " Wilt thou
let me there ? " said the drover. And so the man was enticed into
the sack, and thrown over the fall, and they heard him saying,
" o CHOCH ! o CHOCH ! 's o MO CHEANN MO ciiEANX ! alas, alas !
and oh, my head ! my head !"
When the neighbours came home and found Hugh counting
money, and heard that he had got it at the bottom of the fall, they
got sacks, and the one threw the other over the fall till there was
but one left, and he tied the sack to his sides and threw himself
over, and every one of them was killed ; and Eobhan lurach got
the farms to himself, and the cattle that his neighbours had, and
he took the possession of both artfully, agds gabh e seilbb axn
DA GU SEOLDA.
The incident of getting riches by accusing people of killing a
dead body is common to one of the African tales. Appendix to
Norse tales — " The Ear of Corn and the Twelve Men."
The selling of something valueless, as a source of liches, is
common to a story which I used to hear as a child, from John