m" when one's eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang
the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was "taken," as the phrase is,
"for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they not
take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and maybe
there were some that did not say 'God bless her.'" An old man who lives
by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, "for there
are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[FN#3] there
beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland." She
died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and
it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally,
meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and
countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years
nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of
things, than are our men of learning. She "had seen too much of the
world"; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame
another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as
the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.

[FN#3] A "pattern," or "patron," is a festival in honour of a saint.

The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame
throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind,
and say, "I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see
her," or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have
been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their
kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I
asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool na mna Sidhe
where women of faery have been seen, bow Raftery could have admired
Mary Hynes so much f he had been altogether blind? He said, "I think
Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of
seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more, and
to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight, and a
certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them." Everybody, indeed,
will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind but a
poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already given,
says, "His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are three
things that are the gift of the Almighty--poetry and dancing and
principles. That is why in the old times an ign