“Arrah! then, have you? why, then, you’re a lucky man, Mick Purcell, that’s what you are.”
In an instant she put everything right; and Mick, looking at his bottle, exultingly cried out, “Bottle, do your duty.” In a twinkling, two great stout men with big cudgels issued from the bottle (I do not know how they got room in it) and belaboured poor Mick and his wife and all his family, till they lay on the floor, when in they went again. Mick, as soon as he recovered, got up and looked about him; he thought and thought, and at last he took up his wife and his children; and, leaving them to recover as well as they could, he took the bottle under his coat and went to his landlord, who had a great company: he got a servant to tell him he wanted to speak to him, and at last he came out to Mick.
“Well, what do you want now?”
“Nothing, sir, only I have another bottle.”
“Oh! ho! is it as good as the first?”
“Yes, sir, and better; if you like, I will show it to you before all the ladies and gentlemen.”
“Come along, then.” So saying Mick was brought into the great hall, where he saw his old bottle standing high up on a shelf. “Ah! ha!” says he to himself, “maybe I won’t have you by-and-by.”
“Now,” says his landlord, “show us your bottle.” Mick set it on the floor, and uttered the words: in a moment the landlord was tumbled on the floor; ladies and gentlemen, servants and all, were running, and roaring, and sprawling, and kicking, and shrieking. Wine cups and salvers were knocked about in every direction, until the landlord called out, “Stop those two devils, Mick Purcell, or I’ll have you hanged.”
“They never shall stop,” said Mick, “till I get my own bottle that I see up there at top of that shelf.”
“Get it down to him, give it down to him, before we are all killed!” says the landlord.
Mick put his bottle in his bosom: in jumped the two men into the new bottle, and he carried them home. I need not lengthen my story by telling how they got richer than ever; how his son married his landlord’s only daughter, how he and his wife died when they were very old, and how some of the servants fighting at their wake, broke the bottles; but still the hill has the name upon it; ay, and so ’twill be always Bottle Hill to the end of the world, and so it ought, for it is a strange story.
Some of the fairies did not think the story so strange as Starveling the tailor did, but then they were accustomed to wonderful things. While he was making his way back to his friends (with Puck keeping close watch upon him the while) the King had already fixed upon the next tale-teller, and a French Fay—a brilliant delicate little creature with transparent gauzy wings coloured like the rainbow—was standing on the stool and had begun to tell the story of the