a friend,
but gave him a half-sovereign, and we parted with kindly words. He
was so great a piper that in the few years since his death myths
have already begun to gather around him. I have been told that his
father was taken into a hill of the Danes, the Tuatha de Danaan, the
ancient invisible race, and they had taught him all their tunes and
so bewitched his pipes that they would play of themselves if he
threw them up on the rafters. McDonough's pipes, they say, had not
that gift, but he himself could play those inspired tunes. Lately I
was told the story I have used in this play about his taking away
fifty sovereigns from the shearing at Cregroostha and spending them
at a village near. "I said to him," said the old man who told me this,
"that it would be better for him to have bought a good kitchen of
bacon; but he said, 'Ah, when I want more, I have but to squeeze the
pipes.'" The story of his wife's death and burial as I give it has
been told to me here and there. That is my fable, and the emotion
disclosed by the story is, I think, the lasting pride of the artist
of all ages:

"We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams....
We in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth."

I wrote the little play while crossing the Atlantic in the _Cymric_
last September. Since it was written I have been told at Kinvara
that "McDonough was a proud man; he never would go to a wedding
unasked, and he never would play through a town," So he had laid
down pride for pride's sake, at that time of the burying of his wife.

In Galway this summer one who was with him at the end told me he had
a happy death, "But he died poor; for what he would make in the long
nights he would spend through the summer days." And then she said,
"Himself and Reilly and three other fine pipers died within that year.
There was surely a feast of music going on in some other place."

_Dates of production of plays_.

THE BOGIE MEN was first produced at the Court Theatre, London, July 8,
1912, with the following cast:

_Taig O'Harragha_ J. M. KERRIGAN
_Darby Melody_ J. A. O'ROURKE

THE FULL MOON was first produced at the Abbey
Theatre, Dublin, on November 10, 1910, with the
following cast:

_Shawn Early_ J. O'ROURKE
_Bartley Fallon_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR
_Peter Tannian_ SIDNEY MORGAN
_Hyacinth Halvey_