brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, "That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow"--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--"and she had
blushes in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone
now!" I talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet,
made about her, and how it said, "there is a strong cellar in
Ballylee." He said the strong cellar was the great hole where the river
sank underground, and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter
hurried away under a grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up
out of the dark water at early morning "to taste the fresh water coming
down from the hills."

I first heard of the poem from an old woman who fives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, "I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die," and that he was nearly blind, and had "no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise
you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it." She sang the poem to a friend and to myself in
Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in a
song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing of