,
Though at first he was bay,
And he took great delight
In travelling by night
And by day.

His travels were great
If I could but half of them tell,
He was rode in the garden by Adam,
The day that he fell.

On Babylon plains
He ran with speed for the plate,
He was hunted next day
By Hannibal the great.

After that he was hunted
In the chase of a fox,
When Nebuchadnezzar ate grass,
In the shape of an ox.

We are told in the next verses of his going into the ark with Noah,
of Moses riding him through the Red Sea; then

He was with king Pharaoh in Egypt
When fortune did smile,
And he rode him stately along
The gay banks of the Nile.

He was with king Saul and all
His troubles went through,
He was with king David the day
That Goliath he slew.

For a few verses he is with Juda and Maccabeus the great, with
Cyrus, and back again to Babylon. Next we find him as the horse that
came into Troy.

When ( ) came to Troy with joy,
My horse he was found,
He crossed over the walls and entered
The city I'm told.

I come on him again, in Spain,
And he in full bloom,
By Hannibal the great he was rode,
And he crossing the Alps into Rome.

The horse being tall
And the Alps very high,
His rider did fall
And Hannibal the great lost an eye.

Afterwards he carries young Sipho (Scipio), and then he is ridden by
Brian when driving the Danes from Ireland, and by St. Ruth when he
fell at the battle of Aughrim, and by Sarsfield at the siege of
Limerick.

He was with king James who sailed
To the Irish shore,
But at last he got lame,
When the Boyne's bloody battle was o'er.

He was rode by the greatest of men
At famed Waterloo,
Brave Daniel O'Connell he sat
On his back it is true.

* * * * * * *

Brave Dan's on his back,
He's ready once more for the field.
He never will stop till the Tories,
He'll make them to yield.

Grotesque as this long rhyme appears, it has, as I said, a sort of
existence when it is crooned by the old man at his fireside, and it
has great fame in the island. The old man himself is hoping that I
will print it, for it would not be fair, he says, that it should die
out of the world, and he is the only man here who knows it, and none
of them have ever heard it on the mainland. He has a couple more
examples of the same kind of doggerel, but I have not taken them
down.

Both in English and i