eening.

'Death is a robber who heaps together kings, high princes, and
country lords; he brings with him the great, the young, and the
wise, gripping them by the throat before all the people.

'It is a pity for him who is tempted with the temptations of the
world; and the store that will go with him is so weak, and his
lease of life no better if he were to live for a thousand years,
than just as if he had slipped over on a visit and back again.

'When you are going to lie down, don't be dumb. Bare your knee and
bruise the ground. Think of all the deeds that you put by you, and
that you are travelling towards the meadow of the dead.'

Some of his poems of places, usually places in Mayo, the only ones he
had ever looked on--for smallpox took his sight away in his
childhood--have much charm. 'Cnocin Saibhir,' 'the Plentiful Little
Hill,' must have sounded like a dream of Tir-nan-og to many a poor
farmer in a sodden-thatched cottage:--

'After the Christmas, with the help of Christ, I will never stop if
I am alive; I will go to the sharp-edged little hill; for it is a
fine place, without fog falling; a blessed place that the sun
shines on, and the wind doesn't rise there or any thing of the
sort.

'And if you were a year there, you would get no rest, only sitting
up at night and eternally drinking.

'The lamb and the sheep are there; the cow and the calf are there;
fine lands are there without heath and without bog. Ploughing and
seed-sowing in the right month, and plough and harrow prepared and
ready; the rent that is called for there, they have means to pay
it. There is oats and flax and large-eared barley.... There are
beautiful valleys with good growth in them, and hay. Rods grow
there, and bushes and tufts, white fields are there, and respect
for trees; shade and shelter from wind and rain; priests and friars
reading their book; spending and getting is there, and nothing
scarce.'

In another song in the same manner on 'Cilleaden,' he says:--

'I leave it in my will that my heart rises as the wind rises, or as
the fog scatters, when I think upon Carra and the two towns below
it, on the two-mile bush, and on the plains of Mayo.... And if I
were standing in the middle of my people, age would go from me, and
I would be young again.'

He writes of friend