orant man coming down
from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than
a man with education you'd meet now, for they got it from God"; and a
man at Coole says, "When he put his finger to one part of his head,
everything would come to him as if it was written in a book"; and an
old pensioner at Kiltartan says, "He was standing under a bush one
time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say
it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in
it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The
bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now
between this and Rahasine." There is a poem of his about a bush, which
I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in
this shape.

A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died,
but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told
Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven
from the roof of the house where he lay, and "that was the angels who
were with him"; and all night long there was a great light in the
hovel, "and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that
honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious
songs." It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities to
immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes and Raftery
to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the magnificence and
penury of dreams.

1900.

II

When I was in a northern town awhile ago, I had a long talk with a man
who had lived in a neighbouring country district when he was a boy. He
told me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that had
not been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come from
the Sidhe, and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names of
several beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty had
never brought happiness to anybody. It was a thing, he said, to be
proud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time,
for they were more picturesque than my memory of them.

1902.

A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP

Away to the north of Ben Bulben and Cope's mountain lives "a strong
farmer," a knight of the sheep they would have called him in the Gaelic
days. Proud of his descent from one of the most fighting clans of the
Middle Ages, he is a man of force alike in his wo