heroes and minstrels to the hour when he
chanted over the poem that some bard in the remote ages had fashioned.

Little wonder, too, for his own way of life was close to that of the
Middle Ages. Below in the valley, where the Swilly River debouches into
its sea lough, was a prosperous little town with banks and railway; but
to reach the bleak brown moor where James Kelly's house stood, you must
climb by one of two roads, each so rough and steep that a bicycle cannot
be ridden down them. Here, in a little screen of scrub alders, stands
the cottage, where three generations of the family live together. His
own home consisted simply of two rooms with no upper story, but it was
trim and comfortable, the dresser well filled, and the big pot over the
turf fire gave out a prosperous steam. The son, a grown man, waited from
his turf-cutting to help in our discussion; the wife was abroad that
day, and one daughter was just starting for market with a web of
homespun cloth which they had dressed in the household. The spinning
wheel stood in the corner; but another girl was busy near the fire with
more modern work, hemming shirts with a machine for a Derry factory, and
the bleached linen was the only thing in the house which had not taken
on the brown tints of peat smoke.

James Kelly himself, as he sat by the fire declaiming at me, was all
browns and greys, like the country outside his door; and his eyes were
like brown streams running through that peaty mountain, with their
movement and sparkle, and their dark depths. At other times easy, like
that of all Irish peasants, his manner changed and grew rough and
imperious when the business began. I must not interrupt with questions.
I must write down, syllable for syllable, that the song might be got
"the right way." It was by no means easy to carry out these directions,
for the poem was written in an Irish not spoken to-day, as unlike as the
Chaucerian English is to our common speech; and even to write down
modern Irish by ear I was poorly qualified. Things were made harder,
too, by the manner of recitation, as traditional as the words. He
chanted, with a continuous vocalisation, and while he chanted, elbow and
knee worked like a fiddler's or piper's marking the time. However, with
persistence, I got the thing down, letting him first say a verse fully
through, then writing line by line or as near as I could; then going
back and asking questions in detail: the son coming to my rescue