she sent out two mould
candles lighted; for in those days the women used to have their own
mould, and to make their own candles for Christmas. And we held the
candles there where the grave is, near the gable end of the church; and
my brother went down in the grave and got the stone out, and we buried
him. And there was a sharp breeze blowing at the time, but it never
quenched the candles or moved the flame of them, and that shows that the
Lord had a hand in him.'

He and all the neighbours were glad to hear that there is soon to be a
stone over the grave. 'He is worthy of it; he is well worthy of it,'
they kept saying. A man who was digging sand by the roadside, took me to
his house, and his wife showed me a little book, in which the
'Repentance' and other poems had been put down for her, in phonetic
Irish, by a beggar who had once stayed in the house. 'Many who go to
America hear Raftery's songs sung out there,' they told me with pride.

As I went back along the silent road, there was suddenly a sound of
horses and a rushing and waving about me, and I found myself in the
midst of the County Galway Fox Hounds, coming back from cub-hunting. The
English M.F.H. and his wife rode by; and I wondered if they had ever
heard of the poet whose last road this had been. Most likely not; for it
is only among the people that his name has been kept in remembrance.

There is still a peasant poet here and there, making songs in the 'sweet
Irish tongue,' in which death spoke to Raftery; and I think these will
be held in greater honour as the time of awakening goes on. But the
nineteenth century has been a time of swift change in many countries;
and in looking back on that century in Ireland, there seem to have been
two great landslips--the breaking of the continuity of the social life
of the people by the famine, and the breaking of the continuity of their
intellectual life by the shoving out of the language. It seems as if
there were no place left now for the wandering versemaker, and that
Raftery may have closed the long procession that had moved unbroken
during so many centuries, on its journey to 'the meadow of the dead.'

1900.

* * * * *

It was after I had written this that I went to see Raftery's birthplace,
Cilleaden, in the County Mayo.

A cousin of his came to see me, and some other men, but none of them
remembered him; but they were very proud of his song on Cilleaden, which
'is all th