sweetheart for fair days and
market days, and the daughter of the King of Greece beside you at
night.

'It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was
speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird
through the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you
find me.

'You promised me, and you said a lie to me, that you would be
before me where the sheep are flocked; I gave a whistle and three
hundred cries to you, and I found nothing there but a bleating
lamb.

'You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold
under a silver mast; twelve towns with a market in all of them, and
a fine white court by the side of the sea.

'You promised me a thing that is not possible, that you would give
me gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of
the skin of a bird; and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

'O Donall og, it is I would be better to you than a high, proud,
spendthrift lady: I would milk the cow; I would bring help to you;
and if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you.

'O, ochone, and it's not with hunger or with wanting food, or
drink, or sleep, that I am growing thin, and my life is shortened;
but it is the love of a young man has withered me away.

'It is early in the morning that I saw him coming, going along the
road on the back of a horse; he did not come to me; he made nothing
of me; and it is on my way home that I cried my fill.

'When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness, I sit down and I go
through my trouble; when I see the world and do not see my boy, he
that has an amber shade in his hair.

'It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you; the Sunday that is
last before Easter Sunday. And myself on my knees reading the
Passion; and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

'O, aya! my mother, give myself to him; and give him all that you
have in the world; get out yourself to ask for alms, and do not
come back and forward looking for me.

'My mother said to me not to be talking with you to-day, or
to-morrow, or on the Sunday; it was a bad time she took for telling
me that; it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

'My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe, or as the black
coal that is on the smit