question was, how he could help me. Did I want songs of the modern
kind, or the older songs of Finn Mac-Cool? If it was the latter, it
seemed I was not well able to manage the common talk, and these songs
were written in "very hard Irish, full of ould strong words."

I should like to send the literary Irishmen of my acquaintance one by
one to converse with James Kelly as a salutary discipline. He was
perfectly courteous, but through his courtesy there pierced a kind of
toleration that carried home to one's mind a profound conviction of
ignorance. People talk about the servility of the Irish peasant. Here
was a man who professed his inability to read or write, but stood
perfectly secure in his sense of superior education. His respect for me
grew evidently when he found me familiar with the details of more
stories than he expected. I was raised to the level of a hopeful pupil.
They had been put into English, I told him. "Oh, ay, they would be, in a
sort of a way," said James, with a fine scorn. Soon we broke new ground,
for James had by heart not only the Fenian or Ossianic cycle, but also
the older Sagas of Cuchulain. He confused the cycles, it is true, taking
the Red Branch heroes for contemporaries of the Fianna, which is much as
if one should make Heracles meet Odysseus or Achilles in battle; but he
had these earlier legends by heart, a rare acquirement among the
Shanachies of to-day.

Here then was a type of the Irish illiterate. A man somewhere between
fifty and sixty, at a guess; of middle height, spare and well-knit,
high-nosed, fine-featured, keen-eyed; standing there on his own ground,
courteous and even respectful, yet consciously a scholar; one who had
travelled too--had worked in England and Scotland, and could tell me
that the Highland Gaelic was far nearer to the language of the old days
than the Irish of to-day; finally, one who could recite without apparent
effort long narrative poems in a dead literary dialect. When I find an
English workman who can stand up and repeat the works of Chaucer by
heart, then and not till then I shall see an equivalent for James Kelly.

And yet it would be a different thing entirely. Chaucer has never
survived in oral tradition. But in the West of Donegal, whence James
Kelly's father emigrated to where I found his son, every old person had
this literature in mind, and my friend was no exception. It is among the
younger generation, who have been taught in the National School