come out of them and fight with me?"

"Foolish lad!" the old woman said. She was a wise old woman, but she
believed as much as everybody else did in the legend of the castle in
the lough. "What has he to gain that he need come up and fight with you?
Do you think the black cat's such a fool as to heed your ranting and
your challenging?"

"But what else can I do?"

The old woman took her thread into her hands again, and sat spinning for
two or three minutes without answering a word. She was a sensible old
woman, and it seemed to her a sad pity that a fine young man like her
foster-son should waste his life in pining for the love of a maiden who
had lain asleep and enchanted for three hundred years. Yet the nurse
loved him so dearly that she could not bear to cross him in anything, or
to refuse to do anything that he asked. So she sat spinning and thinking
for a little while, and then said:

"It was a mouse that made him show himself in his own shape first, and
it's few mice he can be catching, I guess, down in the bottom of the
lough. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you half a dozen mice in a
bag tomorrow, and you can let them loose when you get to the water side,
and see if that will bring him up."

Well, Dermot did not think very much of this plan; but still, as he had
asked the old woman to help him, he felt that he could not avoid taking
her advice, and so the next morning his nurse gave him a bag with half a
dozen mice in it, and he carried it with him to the lough. But, alas! as
soon as ever he had opened the bag, all the six mice rushed away like
lightning and were out of sight in a moment.

"That chance is soon ended," Dermot said mournfully to himself; so he
took back the empty bag to his nurse, and told her what had happened.

"You goose, why didn't you let them out one by one?" inquired she.
"Sure they would run when you opened the bag. You should have made play
with them."

"To be sure, so I should; but I never thought of that. I'll do better
next time."

So next day the woman brought him the bag again, filled this time with
fat rats, and he took it to the lough, and laid it down at the water
side, and opened the mouth of it just wide enough for one of the rats to
put out his nose; and then he sat and watched, and watched, letting the
rats run away one by one; but though he sat watching for the whole day,
not a sign did he ever see of the black cat. At last he came
disconsolately home again wi