self to his father, the great and childless hero, whose lament for
his lost son is written in the song that I set out to secure, on a day
of sun and rain, last summer, when great soft clouds drove full sail
through the moist atmosphere, their shadows sweeping over brown moor and
green valley, while far away towards the sea, mountain peaks rose purple
and amethystine in the distance.

Twice before this I had been in the little cottage on Cark Mountain;
first, when the chance rumour heard in a neighbouring cabin of a man
with countless songs and stories sent me off to investigate; and for a
second time, when I had come back with a slightly better knowledge of
Gaelic and had taken down a few verses of the poem. These, sent to an
Irish scholar, had sufficed to identify the ballad with one printed in
Miss Brooke's _Reliques of Irish Poetry_, a characteristic production of
the latter days of the eighteenth century, when Macpherson, with his
adaptation of the Ossianic poems, and Bishop Percy, with his gathering
of old English ballads, had set a fashion soon to culminate in Scott's
great achievement.

They proved, however, not identity only but difference; and the ballad
as I have it in full with its nineteen quatrains, is even less like the
longer version given by O'Halloran to Miss Brooke, than the opening
stanzas suggested. In them the variations were mainly textual, and when
I read out O'Halloran's version to James Kelly, his son, a keen
listener, declared a preference for the printed text. But the old man
was of another mind. "It's the same song," he said, "sure enough, but
there's things changed in it, and I know rightly about them. Some one
was giving it the way it would be easier to understand, leaving out the
old hard words. And I did that myself once or twice the last day you
were here, and I was vexed after, when I would be thinking about it. And
this day you will be to take down what I say, let you understand it or
not; just word for word, the right way it should be spoken."

There you have in a glimpse the custodian of legend. The man was
illiterate, technically, but he knew by instinct, as his ancestors had
known before him, that he was the guardian of the life of a song; he
recognised that it was a scripture which he had no right to mutilate or
alter. He had to the full that respect for a work of literature which is
the best indication of a scholar, and for him at least the line was
unbroken from the Ireland of