of fair-haired damsels, and achieves success in spite of incredible
obstacles, is a being with whom we can all sympathize, and of whom we
never weary of hearing.

With many of these legends which present the myth of light and darkness
in its most attractive form, the reader is already acquainted, and it is
needless to retail stories which have been told over and over again in
books which every one is presumed to have read. I will content myself
with a weird Irish legend, narrated by Mr. Patrick Kennedy, [128]
in which we here and there catch glimpses of the primitive mythical
symbols, as fragments of gold are seen gleaming through the crystal of
quartz.

Long before the Danes ever came to Ireland, there died at Muskerry a
Sculloge, or country farmer, who by dint of hard work and close economy
had amassed enormous wealth. His only son did not resemble him. When the
young Sculloge looked about the house, the day after his father's
death, and saw the big chests full of gold and silver, and the cupboards
shining with piles of sovereigns, and the old stockings stuffed with
large and small coin, he said to himself, "Bedad, how shall I ever be
able to spend the likes o' that!" And so he drank, and gambled, and
wasted his time in hunting and horse-racing, until after a while he
found the chests empty and the cupboards poverty-stricken, and the
stockings lean and penniless. Then he mortgaged his farm-house and
gambled away all the money he got for it, and then he bethought him that
a few hundred pounds might be raised on his mill. But when he went to
look at it, he found "the dam broken, and scarcely a thimbleful of water
in the mill-race, and the wheel rotten, and the thatch of the house all
gone, and the upper millstone lying flat on the lower one, and a coat
of dust and mould over everything." So he made up his mind to borrow a
horse and take one more hunt to-morrow and then reform his habits.

As he was returning late in the evening from this farewell hunt, passing
through a lonely glen he came upon an old man playing backgammon,
betting on his left hand against his right, and crying and cursing
because the right WOULD win. "Come and bet with me," said he to
Sculloge. "Faith, I have but a sixpence in the world," was the reply;
"but, if you like, I'll wager that on the right." "Done," said the old
man, who was a Druid; "if you win I'll give you a hundred guineas." So
the game was played, and the old man, whose right hand