don't blossom as they used since O'Kelly with the fair hair went
away; he that used to forgive us a great share of the rent.

'Since the children of Usnach and Deirdre went to the grave and
Cuchulain, who, as the stories tell us, would gain victory in every
step he would take; since he died, such a story never came of
sorrow or defeat; since the Gael were sold at Aughrim, and since
Owen Roe died, the Branch.'


V.

His life was always the wandering, homeless life of the old bards. After
Cromwell's time, as the houses they went to grew poorer, they had added
music to their verse-making; and Raftery's little fiddle helped to make
him welcome in the Ireland which was, in spite of many sorrows, as merry
and light-hearted up to the time of the great famine as England had been
up to the time of the Puritans. 'He had no place of his own,' I am told,
'but to be walking the country. He did well to die before the bad years
came. He used to play at Kiltartan cross for the dancing of a Sunday
evening. And when he'd come to any place, the people would gather and
he'd give them a dance; for there was three times as many people in the
world then as what there is now. The people would never have let him
want; but as to money, what could he do with it, and he with no place of
his own?' An old woman near Craughwell says: 'He used to come here
often; it was like home to him. He wouldn't have a dance then; my father
liked better to be sitting listening to his talk and his stories; only
when we'd come in, he'd take the fiddle and say: "Now we must give the
youngsters a tune."' And an old man, who is still lamenting the fall in
prices after the Battle of Waterloo, remembers having seen him 'one time