In the "Fairy Legends" I have also given the story of "Barney Henvey"
mentioned above. There is something like it in the "Ingoldsby Legends,"
and, no doubt, in the fairy mythologies of other nations, but my story
is of Irish origin. Heaven only knows through how many ages it has been
handed down to us. It is one of the fairy stories my mother and
grandmother used to tell us as long ago as I can remember. I have a
little grandson who, when smaller, used sometimes to insist when put to
bed after he had said his "lying-down prayers," upon hearing "Barney
Henvey" before he went to sleep; and so it will, no doubt, go on, and
such stories may be told in ages to come, not only in Ireland--"A Nation
once again"--but in every settlement of the Clan-na-Gael throughout the
world.

Friends and neighbours would come to my uncle Oiney's from beside
Castlewellan Lough, and over from Dolly's Brae and Ballymagrehan, who,
after the day's work, enjoyed going "a cailey." I hope my Gaelic League
friends will forgive me if I don't give the correct sound of this word,
but that is my remembrance of how they pronounced it some sixty years
ago in the County Down.

Sometimes at our little gatherings, the "wee boy from England," as the
neighbours called me, would be asked to read from the "Nation" a speech
of the Liberator--the title his countrymen gave O'Connell after Catholic
emancipation. I was always delighted with this; entering as fully and
enthusiastically into the spirit of what I read as any of the company.

As often as not, in Ballymagenaghy there would be sung, to the
accompaniment of fiddle, flute or clarionet, one of those stirring songs
which, week after week, appeared about this time in the "Nation" from
the pens of Thomas Davis, and the brilliant young men in O'Connell's
movement known as the "Young Irelanders "--songs "racy of the soil,"
like the "Nation" itself, which stirred the hearts of the Irish race
like the blast of a trumpet, songs which are still sung by Irish
Nationalists the world over.

On the Sundays, the Bannons and their next neighbours, the Finegans,
MacCartans, and MacKays, with their fiddles, flutes, and clarionets,
supplied the chief part of the instrumental music of the choir--for
there was no organ--at the little mountain chapel at Leitrim, where my
uncle, Father Michael, officiated. The happy remembrances of those
Sundays of my boyhood are always brought back to me whenever I read
T.D. Sullivan's "Dear O