rough the world.' An old woman told me she had heard it in a
tramcar in America; and an old man said: 'I was coming back from England
one time, and there were a lot of Irish-speaking boys from Galway on
board. There was one of them sick all through the night, but he was well
in the morning; and the others came round him and asked him for a song,
and the song he gave was 'Cilleaden.'

They did not seem to know many of his other songs, except the
'Repentance,' which someone remembered having seen sold as a ballad,
with the English on one side and the Irish on the other. And one man
told me: 'The first song Raftery wrote was about a hat that was stole
from a man that was working in that middle field beyond. When the man
was digging, he used to put his hat on a stick in the field to frighten
away the crows; and Raftery got someone to bring away the hat, to make
fun of the man. And then he made a song, making out it was the fairies
had taken it; and he made the man follow them to Cruachmaa, and from
that to Roscommon, and tell all that happened him there.'

And one of them told me: 'He was six years old when the smallpox took
his sight from him; and he was marked very little by the pox, only three
or four little marks--it seemed to settle in his eyes. His father was a
cottier--there were many here in those times. His mother was a Brennan.
There are cousins of his living yet; but in the schools they are
Englished into Rochford.'

A young man said he had been told Raftery was born in some place beyond,
at the foot of the mountain, but the others were very indignant; one got
very angry, and said: 'Don't I know where he was born, and my father was
the one age with him, and they sisters' sons; and isn't Michael Conroy
there below his cousin? and it's up in that field was the house he was
born in, so don't be trying to bring him away to the mountain.'

I went to see the birthplace, a very green field, with two thorn bushes
growing close together by a stone. The field is called 'Sean
Straid'--the old street--for a few cottages had stood there. A man who
lives close by told me he had dug up a blackened stone just there, and a
stone into which a bar had been let, to hang a pot on; and that may have
been the very hearth where Raftery had sat as a child.

I found one old man who remembered him. 'He used to come to my father's
house often, mostly from Easter to Whitsuntide, when the cakes were
made, and there would be music and danc