keen fragrance of bog-myrtle rose as you brushed
through in the morning on your way to the head of a pool. Here was
indeed a desirable academy, and my preceptor matched it. A big,
loose-jointed old man, rough, brownish-gray all over, clothes, hair, and
face; his cheeks were half-hidden by the traditional close-cropped
whisker, and the rest was an ill-shorn stubble. Traditional, too, was
the small, deep-set, blue eye, the large, kindly mouth, uttering English
with a soft brogue, which, as is always the case among those whose real
tongue is Irish, had no trace of vulgarity. Indeed, it would have been
strange that vulgarity of any sort should show in one who had perfect
manners, and the instinct of a scholar, for this preceptor was not even
technically illiterate. He could read and write English, and Irish, too,
which is by no means so common; and I have not often seen a man happier
than he was over Douglas Hyde's collection of Connacht love-songs, which
I had fortunately brought with me. But his main interest was in
history--that history which had been rigorously excluded from his school
training, the history of Ireland. I would go on ahead to fish a pool,
and leave him poring over Hyde's book; but when he picked me up,
conversation went on where it broke off--somewhere among the fortunes of
Desmonds and Burkes, O'Neills and O'Donnells. And when one had hooked a
large sea-trout, on a singularly bad day, in a place where no sea-trout
was expected, it was a little disappointing to find that Charlie's only
remark, as he swept the net under my capture, was: "The Clancartys was
great men too. Is there any of them living?" The scholar in him had
completely got the better of the sportsman.

Beyond his historic lore (which was really considerable, and by no means
inaccurate) he had many songs by heart, some of them made by Carolan,
some by nameless poets, written in the Irish which is spoken to-day. I
wrote down a couple of Charlie's lyrics which had evidently a local
origin; but what I sought was one of the Shanachies who carried in his
memory the classic literature of Ireland, the epics or ballads of an
older day. Charlie was familiar, of course, with the matter of this
"Ossianic" literature, as we all are, for example, with the story of
Ulysses. He knew how Oisin dared to go with a fairy woman to her own
land; how he returned in defiance of her warning; how he found himself
lonely and broken in a changed land; and how, in the e