So Jack looked about for some place
where there would be better grass, and after a while he saw a field
with good green grass in it, and it belonging to a giant.
where there would be better grass, and after a while he saw a field
with good green grass in it, and it belonging to a giant.
Yeats
They are getting tired of the world.
It is
killed they want to be. It will be no matter; but sure the French want
nothing but peace and quietness. The people here don't mind the war
coming. They could not be worse than they are. They may as well die
soldierly before God. Sure they will get quarters in heaven. ' Then
she began to say that it would be a hard thing to see children tossed
about on bayonets, and I knew her mind was running on traditions of
the great rebellion. She said presently, 'I never knew a man that was
in a battle that liked to speak of it after. They'd sooner be throwing
hay down from a hayrick. ' She told me how she and her neighbours used
to be sitting over the fire when she was a girl, talking of the war
that was coming, and now she was afraid it was coming again, for she
had dreamed that all the bay was 'stranded and covered with seaweed. '
I asked her if it was in the Fenian times that she had been so much
afraid of war coming. But she cried out, 'Never had I such fun and
pleasure as in the Fenian times. I was in a house where some of the
officers used to be staying, and in the daytime I would be walking
after the soldiers' band, and at night I'd be going down to the end
of the garden watching a soldier, with his red coat on him, drilling
the Fenians in the field behind the house. One night the boys tied the
liver of an old horse, that had been dead three weeks, to the knocker,
and I found it when I opened the door in the morning. ' And presently
our talk of war shifted, as it had a way of doing, to the battle of the
Black Pig, which seems to her a battle between Ireland and England,
but to me an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the Ancestral
Darkness again, and from this to sayings about war and vengeance. 'Do
you know,' she said, 'what the curse of the Four Fathers is? They put
the man-child on the spear, and somebody said to them, "You will be
cursed in the fourth generation after you," and that is why disease or
anything always comes in the fourth generation. '
1902.
THE QUEEN AND THE FOOL
I HAVE heard one Hearne, a witch-doctor, who is on the border of
Clare and Galway, say that in 'every household' of faery 'there is a
queen and a fool,' and that if you are 'touched' by either you never
recover, though you may from the touch of any other in faery. He said
of the fool that he was 'maybe the wisest of all,' and spoke of him
as dressed like one of 'the mummers that used to be going about the
country. ' Since then a friend has gathered me some few stories of him,
and I have heard that he is known, too, in the highlands. I remember
seeing a long, lank, ragged man sitting by the hearth in the cottage
of an old miller not far from where I am now writing, and being told
that he was a fool; and I find from the stories that my friend has
gathered that he is believed to go to faery in his sleep; but whether
he becomes an _Amadan-na-Breena_, a fool of the forth, and is attached
to a household there, I cannot tell. It was an old woman that I know
well, and who has been in faery herself, that spoke of him. She said,
'There are fools amongst them, and the fools we see, like that _Amadan_
of Ballylee, go away with them at night, and so do the woman fools that
we call _Oinseachs_ (apes). ' A woman who is related to the witch-doctor
on the border of Clare, and who can cure people and cattle by spells,
said, 'There are some cures I can't do. I can't help any one that has
got a stroke from the queen or the fool of the forth. I knew of a
woman that saw the queen one time, and she looked like any Christian.
I never heard of any that saw the fool but one woman that was walking
near Gort, and she called out, "There's the fool of the forth coming
after me. " So her friends that were with her called out, though they
could see nothing, and I suppose he went away at that, for she got no
harm. He was like a big strong man, she said, and half naked, and that
is all she said about him. I have never seen any myself, but I am a
cousin of Hearne, and my uncle was away twenty-one years. ' The wife of
the old miller said, 'It is said they are mostly good neighbours, but
the stroke of the fool is what there is no cure for; any one that gets
that is gone. The _Amadan-na-Breena_ we call him! ' And an old woman
who lives in the Bog of Kiltartan, and is very poor, said, 'It is true
enough, there is no cure for the stroke of the _Amadan-na-Breena_.
There was an old man I knew long ago, he had a tape, and he could tell
what diseases you had with measuring you; and he knew many things,
and he said to me one time, "What month of the year is the worst? "
and I said, "The month of May, of course. " "It is not," he said; "but
the month of June, for that's the month that the _Amadan_ gives his
stroke! " They say he looks like any other man, but he's leathan (wide),
and not smart. I knew a boy one time got a great fright, for a lamb
looked over the wall at him with a beard on it, and he knew it was the
_Amadan_, for it was the month of June. And they brought him to that
man I was telling about, that had the tape, and when he saw him he
said, "Send for the priest, and get a Mass said over him. " And so they
did, and what would you say but he's living yet and has a family! A
certain Regan said, "They, the other sort of people, might be passing
you close here and they might touch you. But any that gets the touch
of the _Amadan-na-Breena_ is done for. " It's true enough that it's in
the month of June he's most likely to give the touch. I knew one that
got it, and he told me about it himself. He was a boy I knew well, and
he told me that one night a gentleman came to him, that had been his
landlord, and that was dead. And he told him to come along with him,
for he wanted him to fight another man. And when he went he found two
great troops of them, and the other troop had a living man with them
too, and he was put to fight him. And they had a great fight, and he
got the better of the other man, and then the troop on his side gave a
great shout, and he was left home again. But about three years after
that he was cutting bushes in a wood and he saw the _Amadan_ coming at
him. He had a big vessel in his arms, and it was shining, so that the
boy could see nothing else; but he put it behind his back then and came
running, and the boy said he looked wild and wide, like the side of the
hill. And the boy ran, and he threw the vessel after him, and it broke
with a great noise, and whatever came out of it, his head was gone
there and then. He lived for a while after, and used to tell us many
things, but his wits were gone. He thought they mightn't have liked him
to beat the other man, and he used to be afraid something would come
on him. ' And an old woman in a Galway workhouse, who had some little
knowledge of Queen Maive, said the other day, 'The _Amadan-na-Breena_
changes his shape every two days. Sometimes he comes like a youngster,
and then he'll come like the worst of beasts, trying to give the touch
he used to be. I heard it said of late he was shot, but I think myself
it would be hard to shoot him. '
I knew a man who was trying to bring before his mind's eye an image of
AEngus, the old Irish god of love and poetry and ecstasy, who changed
four of his kisses into birds, and suddenly the image of a man with a
cap and bells rushed before his mind's eye, and grew vivid and spoke
and called itself 'AEngus' messenger. ' And I knew another man, a truly
great seer, who saw a white fool in a visionary garden, where there
was a tree with peacocks' feathers instead of leaves, and flowers that
opened to show little human faces when the white fool had touched them
with his coxcomb, and he saw at another time a white fool sitting by a
pool and smiling and watching the images of many fair women floating up
from the pool.
What else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power and
beauty? and foolishness may be a kind of death. I cannot think
wonderful that many should see a fool with a shining vessel or some
enchantment or wisdom or dream too powerful for mortal brains in 'every
household of them. ' It is natural, too, that there should be a queen
to every household of them, and that one should hear little of their
kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient
peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. The
self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces
by foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and
therefore fools may get, and women do get of a certainty, glimpses of
much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey. The man who
saw the white fool said of a certain woman, not a peasant woman, 'If I
had her power of vision I would know all the wisdom of the gods, and
her visions do not interest her. ' And I know of another woman, also not
a peasant woman, who would pass in sleep into countries of an unearthly
beauty, and who never cared for anything but to be busy about her house
and her children; and presently an herb doctor cured her, as he called
it. Wisdom and beauty and power may sometimes, as I think, come to
those who die every day they live, though their dying may not be like
the dying Shakespeare spoke of. There is a war between the living and
the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it. They will have
it that when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of
the earth decay, they ripen in faery, and that our dreams lose their
wisdom when the sap rises in the trees, and that our dreams can make
the trees wither, and that one hears the bleating of the lambs of faery
in November, and that blind eyes can see more than other eyes. Because
the soul always believes in these, or in like things, the cell and the
wilderness shall never be long empty, or lovers come into the world who
will not understand the verse--
'Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
How love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought to the world's dim boundaries clinging,
And music when one's beloved is singing,
Is death? '
1901.
THE FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE OF FAERY
THOSE that see the people of faery most often, and so have the most of
their wisdom, are often very poor, but often, too, they are thought to
have a strength beyond that of man, as though one came, when one has
passed the threshold of trance, to those sweet waters where Maeldun saw
the dishevelled eagles bathe and become young again.
There was an old Martin Roland, who lived near a bog a little out of
Gort, who saw them often from his young days, and always towards the
end of his life, though I would hardly call him their friend. He told
me a few months before his death that 'they' would not let him sleep
at night with crying things at him in Irish, and with playing their
pipes. He had asked a friend of his what he should do, and the friend
had told him to buy a flute, and play on it when they began to shout or
to play on their pipes, and maybe they would give up annoying him; and
he did, and they always went out into the field when he began to play.
He showed me the pipe, and blew through it, and made a noise, but he
did not know how to play; and then he showed me where he had pulled his
chimney down, because one of them used to sit up on it and play on the
pipes. A friend of his and mine went to see him a little time ago, for
she heard that 'three of them' had told him he was to die. He said they
had gone away after warning him, and that the children (children they
had 'taken,' I suppose) who used to come with them, and play about the
house with them, had 'gone to some other place,' because 'they found
the house too cold for them, maybe'; and he died a week after he had
said these things.
His neighbours were not certain that he really saw anything in his old
age, but they were all certain that he saw things when he was a young
man. His brother said, 'Old he is, and it's all in his brain the things
he sees. If he was a young man we might believe in him. ' But he was
improvident, and never got on with his brothers. A neighbour said, 'The
poor man, they say they are mostly in his head now, but sure he was a
fine fresh man twenty years ago the night he saw them linked in two
lots, like young slips of girls walking together. It was the night they
took away Fallon's little girl. ' And she told how Fallon's little girl
had met a woman 'with red hair that was as bright as silver,' who took
her away. Another neighbour, who was herself 'clouted over the ear' by
one of them for going into a fort where they were, said, 'I believe
it's mostly in his head they are; and when he stood in the door last
night I said, "The wind does be always in my ears, and the sound of it
never stops," to make him think it was the same with him; but he says,
"I hear them singing and making music all the time, and one of them
is after bringing out a little flute, and it's on it he's playing to
them. " And this I know, that when he pulled down the chimney where he
said the piper used to be sitting and playing, he lifted up stones,
and he an old man, that I could not have lifted when I was young and
strong. '
A friend has sent me from Ulster an account of one who was on terms
of true friendship with the people of faery. It has been taken down
accurately, for my friend, who had heard the old woman's story some
time before I heard of it, got her to tell it over again, and wrote
it out at once. She began by telling the old woman that she did not
like being in the house alone because of the ghosts and faeries;
and the old woman said, 'There's nothing to be frightened about in
faeries, miss. Many's the time I talked to a woman myself that was
a faery, or something of the sort, and no less and more than mortal
anyhow. She used to come about your grandfather's house--your mother's
grandfather, that is--in my young days. But you'll have heard all about
her. ' My friend said that she had heard about her, but a long time
before, and she wanted to hear about her again; and the old woman went
on, 'Well, dear, the very first time ever I heard word of her coming
about was when your uncle--that is, your mother's uncle--Joseph married,
and building a house for his wife, for he brought her first to his
father's, up at the house by the Lough. My father and us were living
nigh hand to where the new house was to be built, to overlook the men
at their work. My father was a weaver, and brought his looms and all
there into a cottage that was close by. The foundations were marked
out, and the building stones lying about, but the masons had not come
yet; and one day I was standing with my mother fornent the house, when
we sees a smart wee woman coming up the field over the burn to us. I
was a bit of a girl at the time, playing about and sporting myself, but
I mind her as well as if I saw her there now! ' My friend asked how the
woman was dressed, and the old woman said, 'It was a gray cloak she
had on, with a green cashmere skirt and a black silk handkercher tied
round her head, like the country women did use to wear in them times. '
My friend asked, 'How wee was she? ' And the old woman said, 'Well now,
she wasn't wee at all when I think of it, for all we called her the
Wee Woman. She was bigger than many a one, and yet not tall as you
would say. She was like a woman about thirty, brown-haired and round
in the face. She was like Miss Betty, your grandmother's sister, and
Betty was like none of the rest, not like your grandmother, nor any of
them. She was round and fresh in the face, and she never was married,
and she never would take any man; and we used to say that the Wee
Woman--her being like Betty--was, maybe, one of their own people that had
been took off before she grew to her full height, and for that she was
always following us and warning and foretelling. This time she walks
straight over to where my mother was standing. "Go over to the Lough
this minute! "--ordering her like that--"Go over to the Lough, and tell
Joseph that he must change the foundation of this house to where I'll
show you fornent the thorn-bush. That is where it is to be built, if he
is to have luck and prosperity, so do what I'm telling ye this minute. "
The house was being built on "the path" I suppose--the path used by the
people of faery in their journeys, and my mother brings Joseph down
and shows him, and he changes the foundations, the way he was bid, but
didn't bring it exactly to where was pointed, and the end of that was,
when he come to the house, his own wife lost her life with an accident
that come to a horse that hadn't room to turn right with a harrow
between the bush and the wall. The Wee Woman was queer and angry when
next she come, and says to us, "He didn't do as I bid him, but he'll
see what he'll see. "' My friend asked where the woman came from this
time, and if she was dressed as before, and the woman said, 'Always the
same way, up the field beyant the burn. It was a thin sort of shawl she
had about her in summer, and a cloak about her in winter; and many and
many a time she came, and always it was good advice she was giving to
my mother, and warning her what not to do if she would have good luck.
There was none of the other children of us ever seen her unless me;
but I used to be glad when I seen her coming up the burn, and would run
out and catch her by the hand and the cloak, and call to my mother,
"Here's the Wee Woman! " No man body ever seen her. My father used to
be wanting to, and was angry with my mother and me, thinking we were
telling lies and talking foolish like. And so one day when she had
come, and was sitting by the fireside talking to my mother, I slips out
to the field where he was digging. "Come up," says I, "if ye want to
see her. She's sitting at the fireside now, talking to mother. " So in
he comes with me and looks round angry like and sees nothing, and he up
with a broom that was near hand and hits me a crig with it. "Take that
now! " says he, "for making a fool of me! " and away with him as fast as
he could, and queer and angry with me. The Wee Woman says to me then,
"Ye got that now for bringing people to see me. No man body ever seen
me, and none ever will. "
'There was one day, though, she gave him a queer fright anyway, whether
he had seen her or not. He was in among the cattle when it happened,
and he comes up to the house all trembling like. "Don't let me hear
you say another word of your Wee Woman. I have got enough of her this
time. " Another time, all the same, he was up Gortin to sell horses, and
before he went off, in steps the Wee Woman and says she to my mother,
holding out a sort of a weed, "Your man is gone up by Gortin, and
there's a bad fright waiting him coming home, but take this and sew it
in his coat, and he'll get no harm by it. " My mother takes the herb,
but thinks to herself, "Sure there's nothing in it," and throws it on
the fire, and lo and behold, and sure enough! coming home from Gortin,
my father got as bad a fright as ever he got in his life. What it was I
don't right mind, but anyway he was badly damaged by it. My mother was
in a queer way frightened of the Wee Woman, after what she had done,
and sure enough the next time she was angry. "Ye didn't believe me,"
she said, "and ye threw the herb I gave ye in the fire, and I went far
enough for it. " There was another time she came and told how William
Hearne was dead in America. "Go over," she says, "to the Lough, and say
that William is dead, and he died happy, and this was the last Bible
chapter ever he read," and with that she gave the verse and chapter.
"Go," she says, "and tell them to read them at the next class meeting,
and that I held his head while he died. " And sure enough word came
after that how William had died on the day she named. And, doing as she
bid about the chapter and hymn, they never had such a prayer-meeting as
that. One day she and me and my mother was standing talking, and she
was warning her about something, when she says of a sudden, "Here comes
Miss Letty in all her finery, and it's time for me to be off. " And with
that she gave a swirl round on her feet, and raises up in the air, and
round and round she goes, and up and up, as if it was a winding stairs
she went up, only far swifter. She went up and up, till she was no
bigger than a bird up against the clouds, singing and singing the whole
time the loveliest music I ever heard in my life from that day to this.
It wasn't a hymn she was singing, but poetry, lovely poetry, and me and
my mother stands gaping up, and all of a tremble. "What is she at all,
mother? " says I. "Is it an angel she is or a faery woman, or what? "
With that up come Miss Letty, that was your grandmother, dear, but Miss
Letty she was then, and no word of her being anything else, and she
wondered to see us gaping up that way, till me and my mother told her
of it. She went on gay-dressed then, and was lovely looking. She was up
the lane where none of us could see her coming forward when the Wee
Woman rose up in that queer way, saying, "Here comes Miss Letty in all
her finery. " Who knows to what far country she went, or to see whom
dying?
'It was never after dark she came, but daylight always, as far as I
mind, but wanst, and that was on a Hallow Eve night. My mother was by
the fire, making ready the supper; she had a duck down and some apples.
In slips the Wee Woman, "I'm come to pass my Hallow Eve with you," says
she. "That's right," says my mother, and thinks to herself, "I can
give her her supper nicely. " Down she sits by the fire a while. "Now
I'll tell you where you'll bring my supper," says she. "In the room
beyond there beside the loom--set a chair in and a plate. " "When ye're
spending the night, mayn't ye as well sit by the table and eat with the
rest of us? " "Do what you're bid, and set whatever you give me in the
room beyant. I'll eat there and nowhere else. " So my mother sets her a
plate of duck and some apples, whatever was going, in where she bid,
and we got to our supper and she to hers; and when we rose I went in,
and there, lo and behold ye, was her supper-plate a bit ate of each
portion, and she clean gone! '
1897.
DREAMS THAT HAVE NO MORAL
THE friend who heard about Maive and the hazel-stick went to the
workhouse another day. She found the old people cold and wretched,
'like flies in winter,' she said; but they forgot the cold when they
began to talk. A man had just left them who had played cards in a
rath with the people of faery, who had played 'very fair'; and one
old man had seen an enchanted black pig one night, and there were two
old people my friend had heard quarrelling as to whether Raftery or
Callanan was the better poet. One had said of Raftery, 'He was a big
man, and his songs have gone through the whole world. I remember him
well. He had a voice like the wind'; but the other was certain 'that
you would stand in the snow to listen to Callanan. ' Presently an old
man began to tell my friend a story, and all listened delightedly,
bursting into laughter now and then. The story, which I am going to
tell just as it was told, was one of those old rambling moral-less
tales, which are the delight of the poor and the hard driven, wherever
life is left in its natural simplicity. They tell of a time when
nothing had consequences, when even if you were killed, if only you
had a good heart, somebody would bring you to life again with a touch
of a rod, and when if you were a prince and happened to look exactly
like your brother, you might go to bed with his queen, and have only
a little quarrel afterwards. We too, if we were so weak and poor that
everything threatened us with misfortune, would remember, if foolish
people left us alone, every old dream that has been strong enough to
fling the weight of the world from its shoulders.
There was a king one time who was very much put out because he had no
son, and he went at last to consult his chief adviser. And the chief
adviser said, 'It's easy enough managed if you do as I tell you. Let
you send some one,' says he, 'to such a place to catch a fish. And when
the fish is brought in, give it to the queen, your wife, to eat. '
So the king sent as he was told, and the fish was caught and brought
in, and he gave it to the cook, and bade her put it before the fire,
but to be careful with it, and not to let any blob or blister rise on
it. But it is impossible to cook a fish before the fire without the
skin of it rising in some place or other, and so there came a blob on
the skin, and the cook put her finger on it to smooth it down, and then
she put her finger into her mouth to cool it, and so she got a taste
of the fish. And then it was sent up to the queen, and she ate it, and
what was left of it was thrown out into the yard, and there was a mare
in the yard and a greyhound, and they ate the bits that were thrown out.
And before a year was out, the queen had a young son, and the cook had
a young son, and the mare had two foals, and the greyhound had two pups.
And the two young sons were sent out for a while to some place to be
cared, and when they came back they were so much like one another no
person could know which was the queen's son and which was the cook's.
And the queen was vexed at that, and she went to the chief adviser and
said, 'Tell me some way that I can know which is my own son, for I
don't like to be giving the same eating and drinking to the cook's son
as to my own. ' 'It is easy to know that,' said the chief adviser, 'if
you will do as I tell you. Go you outside, and stand at the door they
will be coming in by, and when they see you, your own son will bow his
head, but the cook's son will only laugh. '
So she did that, and when her own son bowed his head, her servants put
a mark on him that she would know him again. And when they were all
sitting at their dinner after that, she said to Jack, that was the
cook's son, 'It is time for you to go away out of this, for you are not
my son. ' And her own son, that we will call Bill, said, 'Do not send
him away, are we not brothers? 'But Jack said, 'I would have been long
ago out of this house if I knew it was not my own father and mother
owned it. ' And for all Bill could say to him, he would not stop. But
before he went, they were by the well that was in the garden, and he
said to Bill, 'If harm ever happens to me, that water on the top of the
well will be blood, and the water below will be honey. '
Then he took one of the pups, and one of the two horses, that was
foaled after the mare eating the fish, and the wind that was after him
could not catch him, and he caught the wind that was before him. And
he went on till he came to a weaver's house, and he asked him for
a lodging, and he gave it to him. And then he went on till he came
to a king's house, and he sent in at the door to ask, 'Did he want a
servant? ' 'All I want,' said the king, 'is a boy that will drive out
the cows to the field every morning, and bring them in at night to be
milked. ' 'I will do that for you,' said Jack; so the king engaged him.
In the morning Jack was sent out with the four-and-twenty cows, and
the place he was told to drive them to had not a blade of grass in it
for them, but was full of stones.
So Jack looked about for some place
where there would be better grass, and after a while he saw a field
with good green grass in it, and it belonging to a giant. So he knocked
down a bit of the wall and drove them in, and he went up himself into
an apple-tree and began to eat the apples. Then the giant came into the
field. 'Fee-faw-fum,' says he, 'I smell the blood of an Irishman. I see
you where you are, up in the tree,' he said; 'you are too big for one
mouthful, and too small for two mouthfuls, and I don't know what I'll
do with you if I don't grind you up and make snuff for my nose. ' 'As
you are strong, be merciful,' says Jack up in the tree. 'Come down out
of that, you little dwarf,' said the giant, 'or I'll tear you and the
tree asunder. ' So Jack came down. 'Would you sooner be driving red-hot
knives into one another's hearts,' said the giant, 'or would you sooner
be fighting one another on red-hot flags? ' 'Fighting on red-hot flags
is what I'm used to at home,' said Jack, 'and your dirty feet will be
sinking in them and my feet will be rising. ' So then they began the
fight. The ground that was hard they made soft, and the ground that was
soft they made hard, and they made spring wells come up through the
green flags. They were like that all through the day, no one getting
the upper hand of the other, and at last a little bird came and sat on
the bush and said to Jack, 'If you don't make an end of him by sunset,
he'll make an end of you. ' Then Jack put out his strength, and he
brought the giant down on his knees. 'Give me my life,' says the giant,
'and I'll give you the three best gifts. ' 'What are those? ' said Jack.
'A sword that nothing can stand against, and a suit that when you put
it on, you will see everybody, and nobody will see you, and a pair of
shoes that will make you run faster than the wind blows. ' 'Where are
they to be found? ' said Jack. 'In that red door you see there in the
hill. ' So Jack went and got them out. 'Where will I try the sword? '
says he. 'Try it on that ugly black stump of a tree,' says the giant.
'I see nothing blacker or uglier than your own head,' says Jack. And
with that he made one stroke, and cut off the giant's head that it went
into the air, and he caught it on the sword as it was coming down, and
made two halves of it. 'It is well for you I did not join the body
again,' said the head, 'or you would have never been able to strike it
off again. ' 'I did not give you the chance of that,' said Jack. And he
brought away the great suit with him.
So he brought the cows home at evening, and every one wondered at all
the milk they gave that night. And when the king was sitting at dinner
with the princess, his daughter, and the rest, he said, 'I think I only
hear two roars from beyond to-night in place of three. '
The next morning Jack went out again with the cows, and he saw another
field full of grass, and he knocked down the wall and let the cows in.
All happened the same as the day before, but the giant that came this
time had two heads, and they fought together, and the little bird came
and spoke to Jack as before. And when Jack had brought the giant down,
he said, 'Give me my life, and I'll give you the best thing I have. '
'What is that? ' says Jack. 'It's a suit that you can put on, and you
will see every one but no one can see you. ' 'Where is it? ' said Jack.
'It's inside that little red door at the side of the hill. ' So Jack
went and brought out the suit. And then he cut off the giant's two
heads, and caught them coming down and made four halves of them. And
they said it was well for him he had not given them time to join the
body.
That night when the cows came home they gave so much milk that all the
vessels that could be found were filled up.
The next morning Jack went out again, and all happened as before, and
the giant this time had four heads, and Jack made eight halves of them.
And the giant had told him to go to a little blue door in the side of
the hill, and there he got a pair of shoes that when you put them on
would go faster than the wind.
That night the cows gave so much milk that there were not vessels
enough to hold it, and it was given to tenants and to poor people
passing the road, and the rest was thrown out at the windows. I was
passing that way myself, and I got a drink of it.
That night the king said to Jack, 'Why is it the cows are giving so
much milk these days? Are you bringing them to any other grass? ' 'I am
not,' said Jack, 'but I have a good stick, and whenever they would stop
still or lie down, I give them blows of it, that they jump and leap
over walls and stones and ditches; that's the way to make cows give
plenty of milk. '
And that night at the dinner, the king said, 'I hear no roars at all. '
The next morning the king and the princess were watching at the window
to see what would Jack do when he got to the field. And Jack knew they
were there, and he got a stick, and began to batter the cows, that they
went leaping and jumping over stones, and walls, and ditches. 'There is
no lie in what Jack said,' said the king then.
Now there was a great serpent at that time used to come every seven
years, and he had to get a king's daughter to eat, unless she would
have some good man to fight for her. And it was the princess at the
place Jack was had to be given to it that time, and the king had been
feeding a bully underground for seven years, and you may believe he got
the best of everything, to be ready to fight it.
And when the time came, the princess went out, and the bully with her
down to the shore, and when they got there what did he do, but to tie
the princess to a tree, the way the serpent would be able to swallow
her easy with no delay, and he himself went and hid up in an ivy-tree.
And Jack knew what was going on, for the princess had told him about
it, and had asked would he help her, but he said he would not. But he
came out now, and he put on the suit he had taken from the first giant,
and he came by the place the princess was, but she didn't know him.
'Is that right for a princess to be tied to a tree? ' said Jack. 'It is
not, indeed,' said she, and she told him what had happened, and how the
serpent was coming to take her. 'If you will let me sleep for awhile
with my head in your lap,' said Jack, 'you could wake me when it is
coming. ' So he did that, and she awakened him when she saw the serpent
coming, and Jack got up and fought with it, and drove it back into the
sea. And then he cut the rope that fastened her, and he went away. The
bully came down then out of the tree, and he brought the princess to
where the king was, and he said, 'I got a friend of mine to come and
fight the serpent to-day, where I was a little timorous after being so
long shut up underground, but I'll do the fighting myself to-morrow. '
The next day they went out again, and the same thing happened, the
bully tied up the princess where the serpent could come at her fair
and easy, and went up himself to hide in the ivy-tree. Then Jack put
on the suit he had taken from the second giant, and he walked out, and
the princess did not know him, but she told him all that had happened
yesterday, and how some young gentleman she did not know had come and
saved her. So Jack asked might he lie down and take a sleep with his
head in her lap, the way she could awake him. And all happened the same
way as the day before. And the bully gave her up to the king, and said
he had brought another of his friends to fight for her that day.
The next day she was brought down to the shore as before, and a great
many people gathered to see the serpent that was coming to bring the
king's daughter away. And Jack brought out the suit of clothes he had
brought away from the third giant, and she did not know him, and they
talked as before. But when he was asleep this time, she thought she
would make sure of being able to find him again, and she took out her
scissors and cut off a piece of his hair, and made a little packet of
it and put it away. And she did another thing, she took off one of the
shoes that was on his feet.
And when she saw the serpent coming, she woke him, and he said, 'This
time I will put the serpent in a way that he will eat no more king's
daughters. ' So he took out the sword he had got from the giant, and he
put it in at the back of the serpent's neck, the way blood and water
came spouting out that went for fifty miles inland, and made an end of
him. And then he made off, and no one saw what way he went, and the
bully brought the princess to the king, and claimed to have saved her,
and it is he who was made much of, and was the right-hand man after
that.
But when the feast was made ready for the wedding, the princess took
out the bit of hair she had, and she said she would marry no one but
the man whose hair would match that, and she showed the shoe and said
that she would marry no one whose foot would not fit that shoe as well.
And the bully tried to put on the shoe, but so much as his toe would
not go into it, and as to his hair, it didn't match at all to the bit
of hair she had cut from the man that saved her.
So then the king gave a great ball, to bring all the chief men of the
country together to try would the shoe fit any of them. And they were
all going to carpenters and joiners getting bits of their feet cut off
to try could they wear the shoe, but it was no use, not one of them
could get it on.
Then the king went to his chief adviser and asked what could he do. And
the chief adviser bade him to give another ball, and this time he said,
'Give it to poor as well as rich. '
So the ball was given, and many came flocking to it, but the shoe would
not fit any one of them. And the chief adviser said, 'Is every one here
that belongs to the house? ' 'They are all here,' said the king, 'except
the boy that minds the cows, and I would not like him to be coming up
here. '
Jack was below in the yard at the time, and he heard what the king
said, and he was very angry, and he went and got his sword and came
running up the stairs to strike off the king's head, but the man that
kept the gate met him on the stairs before he could get to the king,
and quieted him down, and when he got to the top of the stairs and the
princess saw him, she gave a cry and ran into his arms. And they tried
the shoe and it fitted him, and his hair matched to the piece that had
been cut off. So then they were married, and a great feast was given
for three days and three nights.
And at the end of that time, one morning there came a deer outside the
window, with bells on it, and they ringing. And it called out, 'Here
is the hunt, where is the huntsman and the hound? ' So when Jack heard
that he got up and took his horse and his hound and went hunting the
deer. When it was in the hollow he was on the hill, and when it was on
the hill he was in the hollow, and that went on all through the day,
and when night fell it went into a wood. And Jack went into the wood
after it, and all he could see was a mud-wall cabin, and he went in,
and there he saw an old woman, about two hundred years old, and she
sitting over the fire. 'Did you see a deer pass this way? ' says Jack.
'I did not,' says she, 'but it's too late now for you to be following a
deer, let you stop the night here. ' 'What will I do with my horse and
my hound? ' said Jack. 'Here are two ribs of hair,' says she, 'and let
you tie them up with them. ' So Jack went out and tied up the horse and
the hound, and when he came in again the old woman said, 'You killed
my three sons, and I'm going to kill you now,' and she put on a pair
of boxing-gloves, each one of them nine stone weight, and the nails
in them fifteen inches long. Then they began to fight, and Jack was
getting the worst of it. 'Help, hound! ' he cried out, then 'Squeeze,
hair,' cried out the old woman, and the rib of hair that was about the
hound's neck squeezed him to death. 'Help, horse! ' Jack called out,
then 'Squeeze, hair,' called out the old woman, and the rib of hair
that was about the horse's neck began to tighten and squeeze him to
death. Then the old woman made an end of Jack and threw him outside the
door.
To go back now to Bill. He was out in the garden one day, and he took
a look at the well, and what did he see but the water at the top was
blood, and what was underneath was honey. So he went into the house
again, and he said to his mother, 'I will never eat a second meal at
the same table, or sleep a second night in the same bed, till I know
what is happening to Jack. '
So he took the other horse and hound then, and set off, over hills
where cock never crows and horn never sounds, and the Devil never blows
his bugle. And at last he came to the weaver's house, and when he
went in, the weaver says, 'You are welcome, and I can give you better
treatment than I did the last time you came in to me,' for she thought
it was Jack who was there, they were so much like one another. 'That is
good,' said Bill to himself, 'my brother has been here. ' And he gave
the weaver the full of a basin of gold in the morning before he left.
Then he went on till he came to the king's house, and when he was at
the door the princess came running down the stairs, and said, 'Welcome
to you back again. ' And all the people said, 'It is a wonder you have
gone hunting three days after your marriage, and to stop so long away. '
So he stopped that night with the princess, and she thought it was her
own husband all the time.
And in the morning the deer came, and bells ringing on her, under the
windows, and called out, 'The hunt is here, where are the huntsmen and
the hounds? ' Then Bill got up and got his horse and his hound, and
followed her over hills and hollows till they came to the wood, and
there he saw nothing but the mud-wall cabin and the old woman sitting
by the fire, and she bade him stop the night there, and gave him two
ribs of hair to tie his horse and his hound with. But Bill was wittier
than Jack was, and before he went out, he threw the ribs of hair into
the fire secretly. When he came in the old woman said, 'Your brother
killed my three sons, and I killed him, and I'll kill you along with
him. ' And she put her gloves on, and they began the fight, and then
Bill called out, 'Help, horse. ' 'Squeeze, hair,' called the old woman;
'I can't squeeze, I'm in the fire,' said the hair. And the horse came
in and gave her a blow of his hoof. 'Help, hound,' said Bill then.
'Squeeze, hair,' said the old woman; 'I can't, I'm in the fire,' said
the second hair. Then the hound put his teeth in her, and Bill brought
her down, and she cried for mercy. 'Give me my life,' she said, 'and
I'll tell you where you'll get your brother again, and his hound and
horse. ' 'Where's that? ' said Bill. 'Do you see that rod over the fire? '
said she; 'take it down and go outside the door where you'll see three
green stones, and strike them with the rod, for they are your brother,
and his horse and hound, and they'll come to life again. ' 'I will, but
I'll make a green stone of you first,' said Bill, and he cut off her
head with his sword.
Then he went out and struck the stones, and sure enough there were
Jack, and his horse and hound, alive and well. And they began striking
other stones around, and men came from them, that had been turned to
stones, hundreds and thousands of them.
Then they set out for home, but on the way they had some dispute or
some argument together, for Jack was not well pleased to hear he had
spent the night with his wife, and Bill got angry, and he struck Jack
with the rod, and turned him to a green stone. And he went home, but
the princess saw he had something on his mind, and he said then, 'I
have killed my brother. ' And he went back then and brought him to
life, and they lived happy ever after, and they had children by the
basketful, and threw them out by the shovelful. I was passing one time
myself, and they called me in and gave me a cup of tea.
1902.
BY THE ROADSIDE
LAST night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to listen to
some Irish songs. While I waited for the singers an old man sang about
that country beauty who died so many years ago, and spoke of a singer
he had known who sang so beautifully that no horse would pass him,
but must turn its head and cock its ears to listen. Presently a score
of men and boys and girls, with shawls over their heads, gathered
under the trees to listen. Somebody sang _Sa Muirnin Diles_, and then
somebody else _Jimmy Mo Milestor_, mournful songs of separation, of
death, and of exile. Then some of the men stood up and began to dance,
while another lilted the measure they danced to, and then somebody
sang _Eiblin a Ruin_, that glad song of meeting which has always
moved me more than other songs, because the lover who made it sang it
to his sweetheart under the shadow of a mountain I looked at every
day through my childhood. The voices melted into the twilight, and
were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too
melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men. Now it was a
phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form, that had
carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies.
I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four
rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the
trees of knowledge and of life. There is no song or story handed down
among the cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as
far, for though one can know but a little of their ascent, one knows
that they ascend like mediaeval genealogies through unbroken dignities
to the beginning of the world. Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the
aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and
trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and
insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and
most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where
all great art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the fireside, or sung
by the roadside, or carved upon the lintel, appreciation of the arts
that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its
hour is come.
In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few
people--three or four thousand out of millions--favoured by their own
characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour,
have understanding of imaginative things, and yet 'the imagination
is the man himself. ' The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts
into their service because men understood that when imagination is
impoverished, a principal voice--some would say the only voice--for the
awakening of wise hope and durable faith, and understanding charity,
can speak but in broken words, if it does not fall silent. And so
it has always seemed to me that we, who would reawaken imaginative
tradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering old stories
into books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Those who are Irish
and would spread foreign ways, which, for all but a few, are ways of
spiritual poverty, take part also. Their part is with who those who
were of Jewry, and yet cried out, 'If thou let this man go thou art not
Caesar's friend. '
1901.
_INTO THE TWILIGHT_
_Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Thy mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from thee or love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of hollow wood and the hilly wood
And the changing moon work out their will.
And God stands winding his lonely horn;
And Time and the World are ever in flight,
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn. _
STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN
RED HANRAHAN
HANRAHAN, the hedge schoolmaster, a tall, strong, red-haired young man,
came into the barn where some of the men of the village were sitting
on Samhain Eve. It had been a dwelling-house, and when the man that
owned it had built a better one, he had put the two rooms together, and
kept it for a place to store one thing or another. There was a fire on
the old hearth, and there were dip candles stuck in bottles, and there
was a black quart bottle upon some boards that had been put across two
barrels to make a table. Most of the men were sitting beside the fire,
and one of them was singing a long wandering song, about a Munster man
and a Connaught man that were quarrelling about their two provinces.
Hanrahan went to the man of the house and said, 'I got your message';
but when he had said that, he stopped, for an old mountainy man that
had a shirt and trousers of unbleached flannel, and that was sitting
by himself near the door, was looking at him, and moving an old pack of
cards about in his hands and muttering. 'Don't mind him,' said the man
of the house; 'he is only some stranger came in awhile ago, and we bade
him welcome, it being Samhain night, but I think he is not in his right
wits. Listen to him now and you will hear what he is saying. '
They listened then, and they could hear the old man muttering to
himself as he turned the cards, 'Spades and Diamonds, Courage and
Power; Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure. '
'That is the kind of talk he has been going on with for the last hour,'
said the man of the house, and Hanrahan turned his eyes from the old
man as if he did not like to be looking at him.
'I got your message,' Hanrahan said then; '"he is in the barn with his
three first cousins from Kilchriest," the messenger said, "and there
are some of the neighbours with them. "'
'It is my cousin over there is wanting to see you,' said the man of the
house, and he called over a young frieze-coated man, who was listening
to the song, and said, 'This is Red Hanrahan you have the message for. '
'It is a kind message, indeed,' said the young man, 'for it comes from
your sweetheart, Mary Lavelle. '
'How would you get a message from her, and what do you know of her? '
'I don't know her, indeed, but I was in Loughrea yesterday, and a
neighbour of hers that had some dealings with me was saying that she
bade him send you word, if he met any one from this side in the market,
that her mother has died from her, and if you have a mind yet to join
with herself, she is willing to keep her word to you. '
'I will go to her indeed,' said Hanrahan.
'And she bade you make no delay, for if she has not a man in the house
before the month is out, it is likely the little bit of land will be
given to another. '
When Hanrahan heard that, he rose up from the bench he had sat down
on. 'I will make no delay indeed,' he said, 'there is a full moon, and
if I get as far as Kilchriest to-night, I will reach to her before the
setting of the sun to-morrow. '
When the others heard that, they began to laugh at him for being in
such haste to go to his sweetheart, and one asked him if he would leave
his school in the old lime-kiln, where he was giving the children such
good learning. But he said the children would be glad enough in the
morning to find the place empty, and no one to keep them at their task;
and as for his school he could set it up again in any place, having as
he had his little inkpot hanging from his neck by a chain, and his big
Virgil and his primer in the skirt of his coat.
Some of them asked him to drink a glass before he went, and a young
man caught hold of his coat, and said he must not leave them without
singing the song he had made in praise of Venus and of Mary Lavelle. He
drank a glass of whiskey, but he said he would not stop but would set
out on his journey.
'There's time enough, Red Hanrahan,' said the man of the house. 'It
will be time enough for you to give up sport when you are after your
marriage, and it might be a long time before we will see you again. '
'I will not stop,' said Hanrahan; 'my mind would be on the roads all
the time, bringing me to the woman that sent for me, and she lonesome
and watching till I come. '
Some of the others came about him, pressing him that had been such a
pleasant comrade, so full of songs and every kind of trick and fun, not
to leave them till the night would be over, but he refused them all,
and shook them off, and went to the door. But as he put his foot over
the threshold, the strange old man stood up and put his hand that was
thin and withered like a bird's claw on Hanrahan's hand, and said: 'It
is not Hanrahan, the learned man and the great songmaker, that should
go out from a gathering like this, on a Samhain night. And stop here,
now,' he said, 'and play a hand with me; and here is an old pack of
cards has done its work many a night before this, and old as it is,
there has been much of the riches of the world lost and won over it. '
One of the young men said, 'It isn't much of the riches of the world
has stopped with yourself, old man,' and he looked at the old man's
bare feet, and they all laughed. But Hanrahan did not laugh, but he sat
down very quietly, without a word. Then one of them said, 'So you will
stop with us after all, Hanrahan'; and the old man said: 'He will stop
indeed, did you not hear me asking him? '
They all looked at the old man then as if wondering where he came
from. 'It is far I am come,' he said, 'through France I have come,
and through Spain, and by Lough Greine of the hidden mouth, and none
has refused me anything. ' And then he was silent and nobody liked to
question him, and they began to play. There were six men at the boards
playing, and the others were looking on behind. They played two or
three games for nothing, and then the old man took a four-penny bit,
worn very thin and smooth, out from his pocket, and he called to the
rest to put something on the game. Then they all put down something
on the boards, and little as it was it looked much, from the way it
was shoved from one to another, first one man winning it and then his
neighbour.
killed they want to be. It will be no matter; but sure the French want
nothing but peace and quietness. The people here don't mind the war
coming. They could not be worse than they are. They may as well die
soldierly before God. Sure they will get quarters in heaven. ' Then
she began to say that it would be a hard thing to see children tossed
about on bayonets, and I knew her mind was running on traditions of
the great rebellion. She said presently, 'I never knew a man that was
in a battle that liked to speak of it after. They'd sooner be throwing
hay down from a hayrick. ' She told me how she and her neighbours used
to be sitting over the fire when she was a girl, talking of the war
that was coming, and now she was afraid it was coming again, for she
had dreamed that all the bay was 'stranded and covered with seaweed. '
I asked her if it was in the Fenian times that she had been so much
afraid of war coming. But she cried out, 'Never had I such fun and
pleasure as in the Fenian times. I was in a house where some of the
officers used to be staying, and in the daytime I would be walking
after the soldiers' band, and at night I'd be going down to the end
of the garden watching a soldier, with his red coat on him, drilling
the Fenians in the field behind the house. One night the boys tied the
liver of an old horse, that had been dead three weeks, to the knocker,
and I found it when I opened the door in the morning. ' And presently
our talk of war shifted, as it had a way of doing, to the battle of the
Black Pig, which seems to her a battle between Ireland and England,
but to me an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the Ancestral
Darkness again, and from this to sayings about war and vengeance. 'Do
you know,' she said, 'what the curse of the Four Fathers is? They put
the man-child on the spear, and somebody said to them, "You will be
cursed in the fourth generation after you," and that is why disease or
anything always comes in the fourth generation. '
1902.
THE QUEEN AND THE FOOL
I HAVE heard one Hearne, a witch-doctor, who is on the border of
Clare and Galway, say that in 'every household' of faery 'there is a
queen and a fool,' and that if you are 'touched' by either you never
recover, though you may from the touch of any other in faery. He said
of the fool that he was 'maybe the wisest of all,' and spoke of him
as dressed like one of 'the mummers that used to be going about the
country. ' Since then a friend has gathered me some few stories of him,
and I have heard that he is known, too, in the highlands. I remember
seeing a long, lank, ragged man sitting by the hearth in the cottage
of an old miller not far from where I am now writing, and being told
that he was a fool; and I find from the stories that my friend has
gathered that he is believed to go to faery in his sleep; but whether
he becomes an _Amadan-na-Breena_, a fool of the forth, and is attached
to a household there, I cannot tell. It was an old woman that I know
well, and who has been in faery herself, that spoke of him. She said,
'There are fools amongst them, and the fools we see, like that _Amadan_
of Ballylee, go away with them at night, and so do the woman fools that
we call _Oinseachs_ (apes). ' A woman who is related to the witch-doctor
on the border of Clare, and who can cure people and cattle by spells,
said, 'There are some cures I can't do. I can't help any one that has
got a stroke from the queen or the fool of the forth. I knew of a
woman that saw the queen one time, and she looked like any Christian.
I never heard of any that saw the fool but one woman that was walking
near Gort, and she called out, "There's the fool of the forth coming
after me. " So her friends that were with her called out, though they
could see nothing, and I suppose he went away at that, for she got no
harm. He was like a big strong man, she said, and half naked, and that
is all she said about him. I have never seen any myself, but I am a
cousin of Hearne, and my uncle was away twenty-one years. ' The wife of
the old miller said, 'It is said they are mostly good neighbours, but
the stroke of the fool is what there is no cure for; any one that gets
that is gone. The _Amadan-na-Breena_ we call him! ' And an old woman
who lives in the Bog of Kiltartan, and is very poor, said, 'It is true
enough, there is no cure for the stroke of the _Amadan-na-Breena_.
There was an old man I knew long ago, he had a tape, and he could tell
what diseases you had with measuring you; and he knew many things,
and he said to me one time, "What month of the year is the worst? "
and I said, "The month of May, of course. " "It is not," he said; "but
the month of June, for that's the month that the _Amadan_ gives his
stroke! " They say he looks like any other man, but he's leathan (wide),
and not smart. I knew a boy one time got a great fright, for a lamb
looked over the wall at him with a beard on it, and he knew it was the
_Amadan_, for it was the month of June. And they brought him to that
man I was telling about, that had the tape, and when he saw him he
said, "Send for the priest, and get a Mass said over him. " And so they
did, and what would you say but he's living yet and has a family! A
certain Regan said, "They, the other sort of people, might be passing
you close here and they might touch you. But any that gets the touch
of the _Amadan-na-Breena_ is done for. " It's true enough that it's in
the month of June he's most likely to give the touch. I knew one that
got it, and he told me about it himself. He was a boy I knew well, and
he told me that one night a gentleman came to him, that had been his
landlord, and that was dead. And he told him to come along with him,
for he wanted him to fight another man. And when he went he found two
great troops of them, and the other troop had a living man with them
too, and he was put to fight him. And they had a great fight, and he
got the better of the other man, and then the troop on his side gave a
great shout, and he was left home again. But about three years after
that he was cutting bushes in a wood and he saw the _Amadan_ coming at
him. He had a big vessel in his arms, and it was shining, so that the
boy could see nothing else; but he put it behind his back then and came
running, and the boy said he looked wild and wide, like the side of the
hill. And the boy ran, and he threw the vessel after him, and it broke
with a great noise, and whatever came out of it, his head was gone
there and then. He lived for a while after, and used to tell us many
things, but his wits were gone. He thought they mightn't have liked him
to beat the other man, and he used to be afraid something would come
on him. ' And an old woman in a Galway workhouse, who had some little
knowledge of Queen Maive, said the other day, 'The _Amadan-na-Breena_
changes his shape every two days. Sometimes he comes like a youngster,
and then he'll come like the worst of beasts, trying to give the touch
he used to be. I heard it said of late he was shot, but I think myself
it would be hard to shoot him. '
I knew a man who was trying to bring before his mind's eye an image of
AEngus, the old Irish god of love and poetry and ecstasy, who changed
four of his kisses into birds, and suddenly the image of a man with a
cap and bells rushed before his mind's eye, and grew vivid and spoke
and called itself 'AEngus' messenger. ' And I knew another man, a truly
great seer, who saw a white fool in a visionary garden, where there
was a tree with peacocks' feathers instead of leaves, and flowers that
opened to show little human faces when the white fool had touched them
with his coxcomb, and he saw at another time a white fool sitting by a
pool and smiling and watching the images of many fair women floating up
from the pool.
What else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power and
beauty? and foolishness may be a kind of death. I cannot think
wonderful that many should see a fool with a shining vessel or some
enchantment or wisdom or dream too powerful for mortal brains in 'every
household of them. ' It is natural, too, that there should be a queen
to every household of them, and that one should hear little of their
kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient
peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. The
self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces
by foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and
therefore fools may get, and women do get of a certainty, glimpses of
much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey. The man who
saw the white fool said of a certain woman, not a peasant woman, 'If I
had her power of vision I would know all the wisdom of the gods, and
her visions do not interest her. ' And I know of another woman, also not
a peasant woman, who would pass in sleep into countries of an unearthly
beauty, and who never cared for anything but to be busy about her house
and her children; and presently an herb doctor cured her, as he called
it. Wisdom and beauty and power may sometimes, as I think, come to
those who die every day they live, though their dying may not be like
the dying Shakespeare spoke of. There is a war between the living and
the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it. They will have
it that when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of
the earth decay, they ripen in faery, and that our dreams lose their
wisdom when the sap rises in the trees, and that our dreams can make
the trees wither, and that one hears the bleating of the lambs of faery
in November, and that blind eyes can see more than other eyes. Because
the soul always believes in these, or in like things, the cell and the
wilderness shall never be long empty, or lovers come into the world who
will not understand the verse--
'Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
How love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought to the world's dim boundaries clinging,
And music when one's beloved is singing,
Is death? '
1901.
THE FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE OF FAERY
THOSE that see the people of faery most often, and so have the most of
their wisdom, are often very poor, but often, too, they are thought to
have a strength beyond that of man, as though one came, when one has
passed the threshold of trance, to those sweet waters where Maeldun saw
the dishevelled eagles bathe and become young again.
There was an old Martin Roland, who lived near a bog a little out of
Gort, who saw them often from his young days, and always towards the
end of his life, though I would hardly call him their friend. He told
me a few months before his death that 'they' would not let him sleep
at night with crying things at him in Irish, and with playing their
pipes. He had asked a friend of his what he should do, and the friend
had told him to buy a flute, and play on it when they began to shout or
to play on their pipes, and maybe they would give up annoying him; and
he did, and they always went out into the field when he began to play.
He showed me the pipe, and blew through it, and made a noise, but he
did not know how to play; and then he showed me where he had pulled his
chimney down, because one of them used to sit up on it and play on the
pipes. A friend of his and mine went to see him a little time ago, for
she heard that 'three of them' had told him he was to die. He said they
had gone away after warning him, and that the children (children they
had 'taken,' I suppose) who used to come with them, and play about the
house with them, had 'gone to some other place,' because 'they found
the house too cold for them, maybe'; and he died a week after he had
said these things.
His neighbours were not certain that he really saw anything in his old
age, but they were all certain that he saw things when he was a young
man. His brother said, 'Old he is, and it's all in his brain the things
he sees. If he was a young man we might believe in him. ' But he was
improvident, and never got on with his brothers. A neighbour said, 'The
poor man, they say they are mostly in his head now, but sure he was a
fine fresh man twenty years ago the night he saw them linked in two
lots, like young slips of girls walking together. It was the night they
took away Fallon's little girl. ' And she told how Fallon's little girl
had met a woman 'with red hair that was as bright as silver,' who took
her away. Another neighbour, who was herself 'clouted over the ear' by
one of them for going into a fort where they were, said, 'I believe
it's mostly in his head they are; and when he stood in the door last
night I said, "The wind does be always in my ears, and the sound of it
never stops," to make him think it was the same with him; but he says,
"I hear them singing and making music all the time, and one of them
is after bringing out a little flute, and it's on it he's playing to
them. " And this I know, that when he pulled down the chimney where he
said the piper used to be sitting and playing, he lifted up stones,
and he an old man, that I could not have lifted when I was young and
strong. '
A friend has sent me from Ulster an account of one who was on terms
of true friendship with the people of faery. It has been taken down
accurately, for my friend, who had heard the old woman's story some
time before I heard of it, got her to tell it over again, and wrote
it out at once. She began by telling the old woman that she did not
like being in the house alone because of the ghosts and faeries;
and the old woman said, 'There's nothing to be frightened about in
faeries, miss. Many's the time I talked to a woman myself that was
a faery, or something of the sort, and no less and more than mortal
anyhow. She used to come about your grandfather's house--your mother's
grandfather, that is--in my young days. But you'll have heard all about
her. ' My friend said that she had heard about her, but a long time
before, and she wanted to hear about her again; and the old woman went
on, 'Well, dear, the very first time ever I heard word of her coming
about was when your uncle--that is, your mother's uncle--Joseph married,
and building a house for his wife, for he brought her first to his
father's, up at the house by the Lough. My father and us were living
nigh hand to where the new house was to be built, to overlook the men
at their work. My father was a weaver, and brought his looms and all
there into a cottage that was close by. The foundations were marked
out, and the building stones lying about, but the masons had not come
yet; and one day I was standing with my mother fornent the house, when
we sees a smart wee woman coming up the field over the burn to us. I
was a bit of a girl at the time, playing about and sporting myself, but
I mind her as well as if I saw her there now! ' My friend asked how the
woman was dressed, and the old woman said, 'It was a gray cloak she
had on, with a green cashmere skirt and a black silk handkercher tied
round her head, like the country women did use to wear in them times. '
My friend asked, 'How wee was she? ' And the old woman said, 'Well now,
she wasn't wee at all when I think of it, for all we called her the
Wee Woman. She was bigger than many a one, and yet not tall as you
would say. She was like a woman about thirty, brown-haired and round
in the face. She was like Miss Betty, your grandmother's sister, and
Betty was like none of the rest, not like your grandmother, nor any of
them. She was round and fresh in the face, and she never was married,
and she never would take any man; and we used to say that the Wee
Woman--her being like Betty--was, maybe, one of their own people that had
been took off before she grew to her full height, and for that she was
always following us and warning and foretelling. This time she walks
straight over to where my mother was standing. "Go over to the Lough
this minute! "--ordering her like that--"Go over to the Lough, and tell
Joseph that he must change the foundation of this house to where I'll
show you fornent the thorn-bush. That is where it is to be built, if he
is to have luck and prosperity, so do what I'm telling ye this minute. "
The house was being built on "the path" I suppose--the path used by the
people of faery in their journeys, and my mother brings Joseph down
and shows him, and he changes the foundations, the way he was bid, but
didn't bring it exactly to where was pointed, and the end of that was,
when he come to the house, his own wife lost her life with an accident
that come to a horse that hadn't room to turn right with a harrow
between the bush and the wall. The Wee Woman was queer and angry when
next she come, and says to us, "He didn't do as I bid him, but he'll
see what he'll see. "' My friend asked where the woman came from this
time, and if she was dressed as before, and the woman said, 'Always the
same way, up the field beyant the burn. It was a thin sort of shawl she
had about her in summer, and a cloak about her in winter; and many and
many a time she came, and always it was good advice she was giving to
my mother, and warning her what not to do if she would have good luck.
There was none of the other children of us ever seen her unless me;
but I used to be glad when I seen her coming up the burn, and would run
out and catch her by the hand and the cloak, and call to my mother,
"Here's the Wee Woman! " No man body ever seen her. My father used to
be wanting to, and was angry with my mother and me, thinking we were
telling lies and talking foolish like. And so one day when she had
come, and was sitting by the fireside talking to my mother, I slips out
to the field where he was digging. "Come up," says I, "if ye want to
see her. She's sitting at the fireside now, talking to mother. " So in
he comes with me and looks round angry like and sees nothing, and he up
with a broom that was near hand and hits me a crig with it. "Take that
now! " says he, "for making a fool of me! " and away with him as fast as
he could, and queer and angry with me. The Wee Woman says to me then,
"Ye got that now for bringing people to see me. No man body ever seen
me, and none ever will. "
'There was one day, though, she gave him a queer fright anyway, whether
he had seen her or not. He was in among the cattle when it happened,
and he comes up to the house all trembling like. "Don't let me hear
you say another word of your Wee Woman. I have got enough of her this
time. " Another time, all the same, he was up Gortin to sell horses, and
before he went off, in steps the Wee Woman and says she to my mother,
holding out a sort of a weed, "Your man is gone up by Gortin, and
there's a bad fright waiting him coming home, but take this and sew it
in his coat, and he'll get no harm by it. " My mother takes the herb,
but thinks to herself, "Sure there's nothing in it," and throws it on
the fire, and lo and behold, and sure enough! coming home from Gortin,
my father got as bad a fright as ever he got in his life. What it was I
don't right mind, but anyway he was badly damaged by it. My mother was
in a queer way frightened of the Wee Woman, after what she had done,
and sure enough the next time she was angry. "Ye didn't believe me,"
she said, "and ye threw the herb I gave ye in the fire, and I went far
enough for it. " There was another time she came and told how William
Hearne was dead in America. "Go over," she says, "to the Lough, and say
that William is dead, and he died happy, and this was the last Bible
chapter ever he read," and with that she gave the verse and chapter.
"Go," she says, "and tell them to read them at the next class meeting,
and that I held his head while he died. " And sure enough word came
after that how William had died on the day she named. And, doing as she
bid about the chapter and hymn, they never had such a prayer-meeting as
that. One day she and me and my mother was standing talking, and she
was warning her about something, when she says of a sudden, "Here comes
Miss Letty in all her finery, and it's time for me to be off. " And with
that she gave a swirl round on her feet, and raises up in the air, and
round and round she goes, and up and up, as if it was a winding stairs
she went up, only far swifter. She went up and up, till she was no
bigger than a bird up against the clouds, singing and singing the whole
time the loveliest music I ever heard in my life from that day to this.
It wasn't a hymn she was singing, but poetry, lovely poetry, and me and
my mother stands gaping up, and all of a tremble. "What is she at all,
mother? " says I. "Is it an angel she is or a faery woman, or what? "
With that up come Miss Letty, that was your grandmother, dear, but Miss
Letty she was then, and no word of her being anything else, and she
wondered to see us gaping up that way, till me and my mother told her
of it. She went on gay-dressed then, and was lovely looking. She was up
the lane where none of us could see her coming forward when the Wee
Woman rose up in that queer way, saying, "Here comes Miss Letty in all
her finery. " Who knows to what far country she went, or to see whom
dying?
'It was never after dark she came, but daylight always, as far as I
mind, but wanst, and that was on a Hallow Eve night. My mother was by
the fire, making ready the supper; she had a duck down and some apples.
In slips the Wee Woman, "I'm come to pass my Hallow Eve with you," says
she. "That's right," says my mother, and thinks to herself, "I can
give her her supper nicely. " Down she sits by the fire a while. "Now
I'll tell you where you'll bring my supper," says she. "In the room
beyond there beside the loom--set a chair in and a plate. " "When ye're
spending the night, mayn't ye as well sit by the table and eat with the
rest of us? " "Do what you're bid, and set whatever you give me in the
room beyant. I'll eat there and nowhere else. " So my mother sets her a
plate of duck and some apples, whatever was going, in where she bid,
and we got to our supper and she to hers; and when we rose I went in,
and there, lo and behold ye, was her supper-plate a bit ate of each
portion, and she clean gone! '
1897.
DREAMS THAT HAVE NO MORAL
THE friend who heard about Maive and the hazel-stick went to the
workhouse another day. She found the old people cold and wretched,
'like flies in winter,' she said; but they forgot the cold when they
began to talk. A man had just left them who had played cards in a
rath with the people of faery, who had played 'very fair'; and one
old man had seen an enchanted black pig one night, and there were two
old people my friend had heard quarrelling as to whether Raftery or
Callanan was the better poet. One had said of Raftery, 'He was a big
man, and his songs have gone through the whole world. I remember him
well. He had a voice like the wind'; but the other was certain 'that
you would stand in the snow to listen to Callanan. ' Presently an old
man began to tell my friend a story, and all listened delightedly,
bursting into laughter now and then. The story, which I am going to
tell just as it was told, was one of those old rambling moral-less
tales, which are the delight of the poor and the hard driven, wherever
life is left in its natural simplicity. They tell of a time when
nothing had consequences, when even if you were killed, if only you
had a good heart, somebody would bring you to life again with a touch
of a rod, and when if you were a prince and happened to look exactly
like your brother, you might go to bed with his queen, and have only
a little quarrel afterwards. We too, if we were so weak and poor that
everything threatened us with misfortune, would remember, if foolish
people left us alone, every old dream that has been strong enough to
fling the weight of the world from its shoulders.
There was a king one time who was very much put out because he had no
son, and he went at last to consult his chief adviser. And the chief
adviser said, 'It's easy enough managed if you do as I tell you. Let
you send some one,' says he, 'to such a place to catch a fish. And when
the fish is brought in, give it to the queen, your wife, to eat. '
So the king sent as he was told, and the fish was caught and brought
in, and he gave it to the cook, and bade her put it before the fire,
but to be careful with it, and not to let any blob or blister rise on
it. But it is impossible to cook a fish before the fire without the
skin of it rising in some place or other, and so there came a blob on
the skin, and the cook put her finger on it to smooth it down, and then
she put her finger into her mouth to cool it, and so she got a taste
of the fish. And then it was sent up to the queen, and she ate it, and
what was left of it was thrown out into the yard, and there was a mare
in the yard and a greyhound, and they ate the bits that were thrown out.
And before a year was out, the queen had a young son, and the cook had
a young son, and the mare had two foals, and the greyhound had two pups.
And the two young sons were sent out for a while to some place to be
cared, and when they came back they were so much like one another no
person could know which was the queen's son and which was the cook's.
And the queen was vexed at that, and she went to the chief adviser and
said, 'Tell me some way that I can know which is my own son, for I
don't like to be giving the same eating and drinking to the cook's son
as to my own. ' 'It is easy to know that,' said the chief adviser, 'if
you will do as I tell you. Go you outside, and stand at the door they
will be coming in by, and when they see you, your own son will bow his
head, but the cook's son will only laugh. '
So she did that, and when her own son bowed his head, her servants put
a mark on him that she would know him again. And when they were all
sitting at their dinner after that, she said to Jack, that was the
cook's son, 'It is time for you to go away out of this, for you are not
my son. ' And her own son, that we will call Bill, said, 'Do not send
him away, are we not brothers? 'But Jack said, 'I would have been long
ago out of this house if I knew it was not my own father and mother
owned it. ' And for all Bill could say to him, he would not stop. But
before he went, they were by the well that was in the garden, and he
said to Bill, 'If harm ever happens to me, that water on the top of the
well will be blood, and the water below will be honey. '
Then he took one of the pups, and one of the two horses, that was
foaled after the mare eating the fish, and the wind that was after him
could not catch him, and he caught the wind that was before him. And
he went on till he came to a weaver's house, and he asked him for
a lodging, and he gave it to him. And then he went on till he came
to a king's house, and he sent in at the door to ask, 'Did he want a
servant? ' 'All I want,' said the king, 'is a boy that will drive out
the cows to the field every morning, and bring them in at night to be
milked. ' 'I will do that for you,' said Jack; so the king engaged him.
In the morning Jack was sent out with the four-and-twenty cows, and
the place he was told to drive them to had not a blade of grass in it
for them, but was full of stones.
So Jack looked about for some place
where there would be better grass, and after a while he saw a field
with good green grass in it, and it belonging to a giant. So he knocked
down a bit of the wall and drove them in, and he went up himself into
an apple-tree and began to eat the apples. Then the giant came into the
field. 'Fee-faw-fum,' says he, 'I smell the blood of an Irishman. I see
you where you are, up in the tree,' he said; 'you are too big for one
mouthful, and too small for two mouthfuls, and I don't know what I'll
do with you if I don't grind you up and make snuff for my nose. ' 'As
you are strong, be merciful,' says Jack up in the tree. 'Come down out
of that, you little dwarf,' said the giant, 'or I'll tear you and the
tree asunder. ' So Jack came down. 'Would you sooner be driving red-hot
knives into one another's hearts,' said the giant, 'or would you sooner
be fighting one another on red-hot flags? ' 'Fighting on red-hot flags
is what I'm used to at home,' said Jack, 'and your dirty feet will be
sinking in them and my feet will be rising. ' So then they began the
fight. The ground that was hard they made soft, and the ground that was
soft they made hard, and they made spring wells come up through the
green flags. They were like that all through the day, no one getting
the upper hand of the other, and at last a little bird came and sat on
the bush and said to Jack, 'If you don't make an end of him by sunset,
he'll make an end of you. ' Then Jack put out his strength, and he
brought the giant down on his knees. 'Give me my life,' says the giant,
'and I'll give you the three best gifts. ' 'What are those? ' said Jack.
'A sword that nothing can stand against, and a suit that when you put
it on, you will see everybody, and nobody will see you, and a pair of
shoes that will make you run faster than the wind blows. ' 'Where are
they to be found? ' said Jack. 'In that red door you see there in the
hill. ' So Jack went and got them out. 'Where will I try the sword? '
says he. 'Try it on that ugly black stump of a tree,' says the giant.
'I see nothing blacker or uglier than your own head,' says Jack. And
with that he made one stroke, and cut off the giant's head that it went
into the air, and he caught it on the sword as it was coming down, and
made two halves of it. 'It is well for you I did not join the body
again,' said the head, 'or you would have never been able to strike it
off again. ' 'I did not give you the chance of that,' said Jack. And he
brought away the great suit with him.
So he brought the cows home at evening, and every one wondered at all
the milk they gave that night. And when the king was sitting at dinner
with the princess, his daughter, and the rest, he said, 'I think I only
hear two roars from beyond to-night in place of three. '
The next morning Jack went out again with the cows, and he saw another
field full of grass, and he knocked down the wall and let the cows in.
All happened the same as the day before, but the giant that came this
time had two heads, and they fought together, and the little bird came
and spoke to Jack as before. And when Jack had brought the giant down,
he said, 'Give me my life, and I'll give you the best thing I have. '
'What is that? ' says Jack. 'It's a suit that you can put on, and you
will see every one but no one can see you. ' 'Where is it? ' said Jack.
'It's inside that little red door at the side of the hill. ' So Jack
went and brought out the suit. And then he cut off the giant's two
heads, and caught them coming down and made four halves of them. And
they said it was well for him he had not given them time to join the
body.
That night when the cows came home they gave so much milk that all the
vessels that could be found were filled up.
The next morning Jack went out again, and all happened as before, and
the giant this time had four heads, and Jack made eight halves of them.
And the giant had told him to go to a little blue door in the side of
the hill, and there he got a pair of shoes that when you put them on
would go faster than the wind.
That night the cows gave so much milk that there were not vessels
enough to hold it, and it was given to tenants and to poor people
passing the road, and the rest was thrown out at the windows. I was
passing that way myself, and I got a drink of it.
That night the king said to Jack, 'Why is it the cows are giving so
much milk these days? Are you bringing them to any other grass? ' 'I am
not,' said Jack, 'but I have a good stick, and whenever they would stop
still or lie down, I give them blows of it, that they jump and leap
over walls and stones and ditches; that's the way to make cows give
plenty of milk. '
And that night at the dinner, the king said, 'I hear no roars at all. '
The next morning the king and the princess were watching at the window
to see what would Jack do when he got to the field. And Jack knew they
were there, and he got a stick, and began to batter the cows, that they
went leaping and jumping over stones, and walls, and ditches. 'There is
no lie in what Jack said,' said the king then.
Now there was a great serpent at that time used to come every seven
years, and he had to get a king's daughter to eat, unless she would
have some good man to fight for her. And it was the princess at the
place Jack was had to be given to it that time, and the king had been
feeding a bully underground for seven years, and you may believe he got
the best of everything, to be ready to fight it.
And when the time came, the princess went out, and the bully with her
down to the shore, and when they got there what did he do, but to tie
the princess to a tree, the way the serpent would be able to swallow
her easy with no delay, and he himself went and hid up in an ivy-tree.
And Jack knew what was going on, for the princess had told him about
it, and had asked would he help her, but he said he would not. But he
came out now, and he put on the suit he had taken from the first giant,
and he came by the place the princess was, but she didn't know him.
'Is that right for a princess to be tied to a tree? ' said Jack. 'It is
not, indeed,' said she, and she told him what had happened, and how the
serpent was coming to take her. 'If you will let me sleep for awhile
with my head in your lap,' said Jack, 'you could wake me when it is
coming. ' So he did that, and she awakened him when she saw the serpent
coming, and Jack got up and fought with it, and drove it back into the
sea. And then he cut the rope that fastened her, and he went away. The
bully came down then out of the tree, and he brought the princess to
where the king was, and he said, 'I got a friend of mine to come and
fight the serpent to-day, where I was a little timorous after being so
long shut up underground, but I'll do the fighting myself to-morrow. '
The next day they went out again, and the same thing happened, the
bully tied up the princess where the serpent could come at her fair
and easy, and went up himself to hide in the ivy-tree. Then Jack put
on the suit he had taken from the second giant, and he walked out, and
the princess did not know him, but she told him all that had happened
yesterday, and how some young gentleman she did not know had come and
saved her. So Jack asked might he lie down and take a sleep with his
head in her lap, the way she could awake him. And all happened the same
way as the day before. And the bully gave her up to the king, and said
he had brought another of his friends to fight for her that day.
The next day she was brought down to the shore as before, and a great
many people gathered to see the serpent that was coming to bring the
king's daughter away. And Jack brought out the suit of clothes he had
brought away from the third giant, and she did not know him, and they
talked as before. But when he was asleep this time, she thought she
would make sure of being able to find him again, and she took out her
scissors and cut off a piece of his hair, and made a little packet of
it and put it away. And she did another thing, she took off one of the
shoes that was on his feet.
And when she saw the serpent coming, she woke him, and he said, 'This
time I will put the serpent in a way that he will eat no more king's
daughters. ' So he took out the sword he had got from the giant, and he
put it in at the back of the serpent's neck, the way blood and water
came spouting out that went for fifty miles inland, and made an end of
him. And then he made off, and no one saw what way he went, and the
bully brought the princess to the king, and claimed to have saved her,
and it is he who was made much of, and was the right-hand man after
that.
But when the feast was made ready for the wedding, the princess took
out the bit of hair she had, and she said she would marry no one but
the man whose hair would match that, and she showed the shoe and said
that she would marry no one whose foot would not fit that shoe as well.
And the bully tried to put on the shoe, but so much as his toe would
not go into it, and as to his hair, it didn't match at all to the bit
of hair she had cut from the man that saved her.
So then the king gave a great ball, to bring all the chief men of the
country together to try would the shoe fit any of them. And they were
all going to carpenters and joiners getting bits of their feet cut off
to try could they wear the shoe, but it was no use, not one of them
could get it on.
Then the king went to his chief adviser and asked what could he do. And
the chief adviser bade him to give another ball, and this time he said,
'Give it to poor as well as rich. '
So the ball was given, and many came flocking to it, but the shoe would
not fit any one of them. And the chief adviser said, 'Is every one here
that belongs to the house? ' 'They are all here,' said the king, 'except
the boy that minds the cows, and I would not like him to be coming up
here. '
Jack was below in the yard at the time, and he heard what the king
said, and he was very angry, and he went and got his sword and came
running up the stairs to strike off the king's head, but the man that
kept the gate met him on the stairs before he could get to the king,
and quieted him down, and when he got to the top of the stairs and the
princess saw him, she gave a cry and ran into his arms. And they tried
the shoe and it fitted him, and his hair matched to the piece that had
been cut off. So then they were married, and a great feast was given
for three days and three nights.
And at the end of that time, one morning there came a deer outside the
window, with bells on it, and they ringing. And it called out, 'Here
is the hunt, where is the huntsman and the hound? ' So when Jack heard
that he got up and took his horse and his hound and went hunting the
deer. When it was in the hollow he was on the hill, and when it was on
the hill he was in the hollow, and that went on all through the day,
and when night fell it went into a wood. And Jack went into the wood
after it, and all he could see was a mud-wall cabin, and he went in,
and there he saw an old woman, about two hundred years old, and she
sitting over the fire. 'Did you see a deer pass this way? ' says Jack.
'I did not,' says she, 'but it's too late now for you to be following a
deer, let you stop the night here. ' 'What will I do with my horse and
my hound? ' said Jack. 'Here are two ribs of hair,' says she, 'and let
you tie them up with them. ' So Jack went out and tied up the horse and
the hound, and when he came in again the old woman said, 'You killed
my three sons, and I'm going to kill you now,' and she put on a pair
of boxing-gloves, each one of them nine stone weight, and the nails
in them fifteen inches long. Then they began to fight, and Jack was
getting the worst of it. 'Help, hound! ' he cried out, then 'Squeeze,
hair,' cried out the old woman, and the rib of hair that was about the
hound's neck squeezed him to death. 'Help, horse! ' Jack called out,
then 'Squeeze, hair,' called out the old woman, and the rib of hair
that was about the horse's neck began to tighten and squeeze him to
death. Then the old woman made an end of Jack and threw him outside the
door.
To go back now to Bill. He was out in the garden one day, and he took
a look at the well, and what did he see but the water at the top was
blood, and what was underneath was honey. So he went into the house
again, and he said to his mother, 'I will never eat a second meal at
the same table, or sleep a second night in the same bed, till I know
what is happening to Jack. '
So he took the other horse and hound then, and set off, over hills
where cock never crows and horn never sounds, and the Devil never blows
his bugle. And at last he came to the weaver's house, and when he
went in, the weaver says, 'You are welcome, and I can give you better
treatment than I did the last time you came in to me,' for she thought
it was Jack who was there, they were so much like one another. 'That is
good,' said Bill to himself, 'my brother has been here. ' And he gave
the weaver the full of a basin of gold in the morning before he left.
Then he went on till he came to the king's house, and when he was at
the door the princess came running down the stairs, and said, 'Welcome
to you back again. ' And all the people said, 'It is a wonder you have
gone hunting three days after your marriage, and to stop so long away. '
So he stopped that night with the princess, and she thought it was her
own husband all the time.
And in the morning the deer came, and bells ringing on her, under the
windows, and called out, 'The hunt is here, where are the huntsmen and
the hounds? ' Then Bill got up and got his horse and his hound, and
followed her over hills and hollows till they came to the wood, and
there he saw nothing but the mud-wall cabin and the old woman sitting
by the fire, and she bade him stop the night there, and gave him two
ribs of hair to tie his horse and his hound with. But Bill was wittier
than Jack was, and before he went out, he threw the ribs of hair into
the fire secretly. When he came in the old woman said, 'Your brother
killed my three sons, and I killed him, and I'll kill you along with
him. ' And she put her gloves on, and they began the fight, and then
Bill called out, 'Help, horse. ' 'Squeeze, hair,' called the old woman;
'I can't squeeze, I'm in the fire,' said the hair. And the horse came
in and gave her a blow of his hoof. 'Help, hound,' said Bill then.
'Squeeze, hair,' said the old woman; 'I can't, I'm in the fire,' said
the second hair. Then the hound put his teeth in her, and Bill brought
her down, and she cried for mercy. 'Give me my life,' she said, 'and
I'll tell you where you'll get your brother again, and his hound and
horse. ' 'Where's that? ' said Bill. 'Do you see that rod over the fire? '
said she; 'take it down and go outside the door where you'll see three
green stones, and strike them with the rod, for they are your brother,
and his horse and hound, and they'll come to life again. ' 'I will, but
I'll make a green stone of you first,' said Bill, and he cut off her
head with his sword.
Then he went out and struck the stones, and sure enough there were
Jack, and his horse and hound, alive and well. And they began striking
other stones around, and men came from them, that had been turned to
stones, hundreds and thousands of them.
Then they set out for home, but on the way they had some dispute or
some argument together, for Jack was not well pleased to hear he had
spent the night with his wife, and Bill got angry, and he struck Jack
with the rod, and turned him to a green stone. And he went home, but
the princess saw he had something on his mind, and he said then, 'I
have killed my brother. ' And he went back then and brought him to
life, and they lived happy ever after, and they had children by the
basketful, and threw them out by the shovelful. I was passing one time
myself, and they called me in and gave me a cup of tea.
1902.
BY THE ROADSIDE
LAST night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to listen to
some Irish songs. While I waited for the singers an old man sang about
that country beauty who died so many years ago, and spoke of a singer
he had known who sang so beautifully that no horse would pass him,
but must turn its head and cock its ears to listen. Presently a score
of men and boys and girls, with shawls over their heads, gathered
under the trees to listen. Somebody sang _Sa Muirnin Diles_, and then
somebody else _Jimmy Mo Milestor_, mournful songs of separation, of
death, and of exile. Then some of the men stood up and began to dance,
while another lilted the measure they danced to, and then somebody
sang _Eiblin a Ruin_, that glad song of meeting which has always
moved me more than other songs, because the lover who made it sang it
to his sweetheart under the shadow of a mountain I looked at every
day through my childhood. The voices melted into the twilight, and
were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too
melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men. Now it was a
phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form, that had
carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies.
I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four
rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the
trees of knowledge and of life. There is no song or story handed down
among the cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as
far, for though one can know but a little of their ascent, one knows
that they ascend like mediaeval genealogies through unbroken dignities
to the beginning of the world. Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the
aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and
trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and
insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and
most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where
all great art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the fireside, or sung
by the roadside, or carved upon the lintel, appreciation of the arts
that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its
hour is come.
In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few
people--three or four thousand out of millions--favoured by their own
characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour,
have understanding of imaginative things, and yet 'the imagination
is the man himself. ' The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts
into their service because men understood that when imagination is
impoverished, a principal voice--some would say the only voice--for the
awakening of wise hope and durable faith, and understanding charity,
can speak but in broken words, if it does not fall silent. And so
it has always seemed to me that we, who would reawaken imaginative
tradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering old stories
into books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Those who are Irish
and would spread foreign ways, which, for all but a few, are ways of
spiritual poverty, take part also. Their part is with who those who
were of Jewry, and yet cried out, 'If thou let this man go thou art not
Caesar's friend. '
1901.
_INTO THE TWILIGHT_
_Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Thy mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from thee or love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of hollow wood and the hilly wood
And the changing moon work out their will.
And God stands winding his lonely horn;
And Time and the World are ever in flight,
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn. _
STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN
RED HANRAHAN
HANRAHAN, the hedge schoolmaster, a tall, strong, red-haired young man,
came into the barn where some of the men of the village were sitting
on Samhain Eve. It had been a dwelling-house, and when the man that
owned it had built a better one, he had put the two rooms together, and
kept it for a place to store one thing or another. There was a fire on
the old hearth, and there were dip candles stuck in bottles, and there
was a black quart bottle upon some boards that had been put across two
barrels to make a table. Most of the men were sitting beside the fire,
and one of them was singing a long wandering song, about a Munster man
and a Connaught man that were quarrelling about their two provinces.
Hanrahan went to the man of the house and said, 'I got your message';
but when he had said that, he stopped, for an old mountainy man that
had a shirt and trousers of unbleached flannel, and that was sitting
by himself near the door, was looking at him, and moving an old pack of
cards about in his hands and muttering. 'Don't mind him,' said the man
of the house; 'he is only some stranger came in awhile ago, and we bade
him welcome, it being Samhain night, but I think he is not in his right
wits. Listen to him now and you will hear what he is saying. '
They listened then, and they could hear the old man muttering to
himself as he turned the cards, 'Spades and Diamonds, Courage and
Power; Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure. '
'That is the kind of talk he has been going on with for the last hour,'
said the man of the house, and Hanrahan turned his eyes from the old
man as if he did not like to be looking at him.
'I got your message,' Hanrahan said then; '"he is in the barn with his
three first cousins from Kilchriest," the messenger said, "and there
are some of the neighbours with them. "'
'It is my cousin over there is wanting to see you,' said the man of the
house, and he called over a young frieze-coated man, who was listening
to the song, and said, 'This is Red Hanrahan you have the message for. '
'It is a kind message, indeed,' said the young man, 'for it comes from
your sweetheart, Mary Lavelle. '
'How would you get a message from her, and what do you know of her? '
'I don't know her, indeed, but I was in Loughrea yesterday, and a
neighbour of hers that had some dealings with me was saying that she
bade him send you word, if he met any one from this side in the market,
that her mother has died from her, and if you have a mind yet to join
with herself, she is willing to keep her word to you. '
'I will go to her indeed,' said Hanrahan.
'And she bade you make no delay, for if she has not a man in the house
before the month is out, it is likely the little bit of land will be
given to another. '
When Hanrahan heard that, he rose up from the bench he had sat down
on. 'I will make no delay indeed,' he said, 'there is a full moon, and
if I get as far as Kilchriest to-night, I will reach to her before the
setting of the sun to-morrow. '
When the others heard that, they began to laugh at him for being in
such haste to go to his sweetheart, and one asked him if he would leave
his school in the old lime-kiln, where he was giving the children such
good learning. But he said the children would be glad enough in the
morning to find the place empty, and no one to keep them at their task;
and as for his school he could set it up again in any place, having as
he had his little inkpot hanging from his neck by a chain, and his big
Virgil and his primer in the skirt of his coat.
Some of them asked him to drink a glass before he went, and a young
man caught hold of his coat, and said he must not leave them without
singing the song he had made in praise of Venus and of Mary Lavelle. He
drank a glass of whiskey, but he said he would not stop but would set
out on his journey.
'There's time enough, Red Hanrahan,' said the man of the house. 'It
will be time enough for you to give up sport when you are after your
marriage, and it might be a long time before we will see you again. '
'I will not stop,' said Hanrahan; 'my mind would be on the roads all
the time, bringing me to the woman that sent for me, and she lonesome
and watching till I come. '
Some of the others came about him, pressing him that had been such a
pleasant comrade, so full of songs and every kind of trick and fun, not
to leave them till the night would be over, but he refused them all,
and shook them off, and went to the door. But as he put his foot over
the threshold, the strange old man stood up and put his hand that was
thin and withered like a bird's claw on Hanrahan's hand, and said: 'It
is not Hanrahan, the learned man and the great songmaker, that should
go out from a gathering like this, on a Samhain night. And stop here,
now,' he said, 'and play a hand with me; and here is an old pack of
cards has done its work many a night before this, and old as it is,
there has been much of the riches of the world lost and won over it. '
One of the young men said, 'It isn't much of the riches of the world
has stopped with yourself, old man,' and he looked at the old man's
bare feet, and they all laughed. But Hanrahan did not laugh, but he sat
down very quietly, without a word. Then one of them said, 'So you will
stop with us after all, Hanrahan'; and the old man said: 'He will stop
indeed, did you not hear me asking him? '
They all looked at the old man then as if wondering where he came
from. 'It is far I am come,' he said, 'through France I have come,
and through Spain, and by Lough Greine of the hidden mouth, and none
has refused me anything. ' And then he was silent and nobody liked to
question him, and they began to play. There were six men at the boards
playing, and the others were looking on behind. They played two or
three games for nothing, and then the old man took a four-penny bit,
worn very thin and smooth, out from his pocket, and he called to the
rest to put something on the game. Then they all put down something
on the boards, and little as it was it looked much, from the way it
was shoved from one to another, first one man winning it and then his
neighbour.
