cin till she goes out and kills the
shark.'

For a shark will sometimes flounder into the fishing-nets and tear his
way out; and even a whale is sometimes seen. I remember an Aran man
beginning some story he was telling me with: 'I was going down that path
one time, with the priest and a few others; for a whale had come
ashore, and the jaw-bones of it were wanted, to make the piers of a
gate.'

As for the love-songs of our coast and island people, they seem to be
for the most part a little artificial in method, a little strained in
metaphor perhaps so giving rise to the Scotch Gaelic saying: 'as
loveless as an Irishman.' Love of country, _tir-gradh_, is I think the
real passion; and bound up with it are love of home, of family, love of
God. Constancy and affection in marriage are the rule; yet marriage 'for
love' is all but unknown; marriage is a matter of commonsense
arrangement between the heads of families. As Mr. Yeats puts it, the
countryman's 'dream has never been entangled by reality.' However this
may be, my Aran friends tell me: 'The people do not care for love-songs;
they would rather have any others.'

Yet I have just seen some love-songs, taken down the other day by a
Kinvara man from a Connemara man, that have some charming lines:--

'Going over the hills after parting from the store of my heart, there is
a mist on them and the darkness of night.'

'It is my sharp grief, my thousand treasures, my road not to be to the
door of your house; it is with you I wore out my shoes from the
beginning of my youth until now.'

'It is not sorry I would be if there was the length of a year in the
day, and the leaves of the trees dropping honey; I myself on the side
where the blossoms are falling, my love beside me, and a little green
branch in her hand.'

'She goes by me like a little breeze of the wind.'

And this line that in a country of separations is already, they tell me,
'passing into a proverb':--

'It is far from one another our rising is every day.'

But the tradition of classical allusions, brought in some centuries ago,
joined to the exaggeration that has been the breath of Irish poets, from
the time Naoise called Deirdre 'a woman brighter than the sun,' has
brought monotony into most of the love-songs.

The ideal country girl, with her dew-grey eye and long amber hair, is
always likened to Venus, to Juno, to Deirdre. 'I think she is nine times
nicer than Deirdre,' says Raftery, 'o