come so heavy we could
hardly hear our voices over the noise on the iron roof.

The old man went on telling of his experiences at sea and the places
he had been to.

'If I had my life to live over again,' he said, 'there's no other
way I'd spend it. I went in and out everywhere and saw everything. I
was never afraid to take my glass, though I was never drunk in my
life, and I was a great player of cards though I never played for
money.'

'There's no diversion at all in cards if you don't play for money'
said the man in the corner.

'There was no use in my playing for money' said the old man, 'for
I'd always lose, and what's the use in playing if you always lose?'

Then our conversation branched off to the Irish language and the
books written in it.

He began to criticise Archbishop MacHale's version of Moore's Irish
Melodies with great severity and acuteness, citing whole poems both
in the English and Irish, and then giving versions that he had made
himself.

'A translation is no translation,' he said, 'unless it will give you
the music of a poem along with the words of it. In my translation
you won't find a foot or a syllable that's not in the English, yet
I've put down all his words mean, and nothing but it. Archbishop
MacHale's work is a most miserable production.'

From the verses he cited his judgment seemed perfectly justified,
and even if he was wrong, it is interesting to note that this poor
sailor and night-watchman was ready to rise up and criticise an
eminent dignitary and scholar on rather delicate points of
versification and the finer distinctions between old words of
Gaelic.

In spite of his singular intelligence and minute observation his
reasoning was medieval.

I asked him what he thought about the future of the language on
these islands.

'It can never die out,' said he, 'because there's no family in the
place can live without a bit of a field for potatoes, and they have
only the Irish words for all that they do in the fields. They sail
their new boats--their hookers--in English, but they sail a curagh
oftener in Irish, and in the fields they have the Irish alone. It
can never die out, and when the people begin to see it fallen very
low, it will rise up again like the phoenix from its own ashes.'

'And the Gaelic League?' I asked him.

'The Gaelic League! Didn't they come down here with their organisers
and their secretaries, and their meetings and their speechifyings,
and start a b