It is Mary Hynes, this calm and easy woman,
Has beauty in her mind and in her face.
If a hundred clerks were gathered together,
They could not write down a half of her ways.


An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the
faeries) at night, says, "Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing ever
made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she'd be at every
hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as
eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn't have any
of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night, sitting
together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got up and set
out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open then, and
when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found him dead
there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before the
famine." Another old man says he was only a child when he saw her, but
he remembered that "the strongest man that was among us, one John
Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing rivers
in the night-time to get to Ballylee." This is perhaps the man the
other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes. There
is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge
hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old
poem said, "the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of
the wolves," but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of
ancient speech. She says, "The sun and the moon never shone on anybody
so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she had
two little blushes on her cheeks." And an old wrinkled woman who lives
close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says, "I
often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches of