I
I have been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in ty Galway, whose name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland.
There is the old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, 「There is a cure for all evil betweewo mill-wheels of Ballylee,」
and to find out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running waters or some other herb. I have beehis summer, and I shall be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of sorrow to make us uand that it is not of the world. An old man brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long, narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he said, 「That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes that are growing over it till they』ve got ky, and they won』t grow any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was like dribbled snow」—he meant driven snow, perhaps,--「and she had blushes in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now!」 I talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about her, and how it said, 「there is a strong cellar in Ballylee.」 He said the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground, and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water at early m 「to taste the fresh water ing down from the hills.」
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who fives about two miles further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She says, 「I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will till I die,」 and that he was nearly blind, and had 「no way of living but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he』d praise you, but if you did not, he』d fault you in Irish. He was the greatest poet in Ireland, and he』d make a song about that bush if he ced to stand u. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he made verses praising it, and thehe water came through he made verses dispraising it.」 She sang the poem to a friend and to myself in Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in a song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the garment of words, flowing and ging with the flowing and ging of their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry of the last tury, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to speak as if he were a rich farmer the best of everything to the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has been made by the try people themselves. I think it h