One fine May m a long time after Hanrahan had left Margaret Rooneys house, he was walking the road near Collooney, and the sound of the birds singing in the bushes that were white with blossom set him singing as he went. It was to his own little place he was going, that was no more than a , but that pleased him well. For he was tired of so many years of wandering from shelter to shelter at all times of the year, and although he was seldom refused a wele and a share of what was in the house, it seemed to him sometimes that his mind was getting stiff like his joints, and it was not so easy to him as it used to be to make fun and sport through the night, and to set all the boys laughing with his pleasant talk, and to coax the women with his songs. And a while ago, he had turned into a that some poor man had left to go harvesting and had never e to again. And when he had mehe thatd made a bed in the er with a few sacks and bushes, and had swept out the floor, he was well tent to have a little place for himself, where he could go in and out as he liked, and put his head in his hands through the length of an evening if the fret was on him, and loneliness after the old times. One by ohe neighbours began to send their children in to get some learning from him, and with what they brought, a few eggs or an oaten cake or a couple of sods of turf, he made out a way of living. And if he went for a wild day and night now and again to the Burrough, no one would say a word, knowing him to be a poet, with wandering in his heart.
It was from the Burrough he was ing that May m, light? hearted enough, and singing some new song that had e to him. But it was not long till a hare ran across his path, and made away into the fields, through the loose stones of the wall. And he k was no good sign a hare to have crossed his path, and he remembered the hare that had led him away to Slieve Echtge the time Mary Lavelle was waiting for him, and how he had never known tent for ah of time sihen. And it is likely enough they are putting some bad thing before me now, he said.
And after he said that he heard the sound in the field beside him, and he looked over the wall. And there he saw a young girl sitting under a bush of white hawthorn, and g as if her heart would break. Her face was hidden in her hands, but her soft hair and her white ned the young look of her, put him in mind et Purcell and Margaret Gillane and Maeve elan and Oona Curry and Celia Driscoll, and the rest of the girls he had made songs for and had coaxed the heart from with his flattering tongue.
She looked up, and he saw her to be a girl of the neighbours, a farmers daughter. What is on you, Nora? he said. Nothing you could take from me, Red Hanrahan. If there is any sorrow on you it is I myself should be well able to serve you, he said then, for it is I know the history of the Greeks, and I know well what sorrow is and parting, and the hardship of the world. And if I am not able to save you from trouble, he said, there is many a one I have saved from it with the power that is in my songs, as it was in the songs of the poets that were before me from the beginning of the world. And it is with the rest of the poets I myself will be sitting and talking in some far place beyond the world, to the end of life and time, he said. The girl stopped her g, and she said, Owen Hanrahan, I often heard you have had sorroersecution, and that you know all the troubles of the world sihe time you