Adapted from Fairy-Tales & Other Stories by Peter Henry Emerson
ONCE UPON A TIME AN OLD blacksmith lived in an old forge at Craig-y-don, and he used to drink a great deal too much beer.
One night he was coming home from an alehouse very tipsy, and as he got near a small stream a lot of little men suddenly sprang up from the rocks, and one of them, who seemed to be older than the rest, came up to him, and said, “If you don’t alter your ways of living you’ll die soon; but if you behave better and become a better man you’ll find it will be to your benefit,” and they all disappeared as quickly as they had come.
The old blacksmith thought a good deal about what the fairies had told him, and he left off drinking, and became a sober, steady man.
One day, a few months after meeting the little people, a strange man brought a horse to be shod. Nobody knew either the horse or the man.
The old blacksmith tied the horse to a hole in the lip of a cauldron (used for the purpose of cooling his hot iron) that he had built in some masonry.
When he had tied the horse up he went to shoe the off hind-leg, but directly he touched the horse the spirited animal started back with a bound, and dragged the cauldron from the masonry, and then it broke the halter and ran away out of the forge and was never seen again: neither the horse nor its master.
When the old blacksmith came to pull down the masonry to rebuild it, he found three brass kettles full of money.