No More Learning

They are farmers and labourers, who do a little fishing
now and then. They do not fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic
and humorous pleasure in their doings. The ghosts themselves share in
their quaint hilarity. In one western town, on whose deserted wharf the
grass grows, these spirits have so much vigour that, when a misbeliever
ventured to sleep in a haunted house, I have been told they flung him
through the window, and his bed after him. In the surrounding villages
the creatures use the most strange disguises. A dead old gentleman
robs the cabbages of his own garden in the shape of a large rabbit.
A wicked sea-captain stayed for years inside the plaster of a cottage
wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises. He was
only dislodged when the wall was broken down; then out of the solid
plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.

FOOTNOTE:

[B] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old Mayo woman,
who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw
'a woman with white borders to her cap going round the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months. '




'DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE. '


I

I HAVE been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, 'There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee,' and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world.
An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, 'That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow'--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--'and she had blushes
in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now! ' I
talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about
her, and how it said, 'there is a strong cellar in Ballylee. ' He said
the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground,
and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a
grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water
at early morning 'to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills. '

I first heard of the poem from an old woman who lives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, 'I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die,' and that he was nearly blind, and had 'no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise
you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it. ' She sang the poem to a friend and to myself
in Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in
a song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing
of their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry
of the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.

'Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.

I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee.