er. It was always at my father's house,
opposite the big tree, that he used to stop when he was in Kilchreest. I
often saw him; but I didn't take much notice of him then, being a child;
it was after that I used to hear so much about him. Though he was blind,
he could serve himself with his knife and fork as well as any man with
his sight. I remember the way he used to cut the meat--across, like
this. Callinan was nothing to him.'

The other old woman, who was from Craughwell, said: 'Callinan was a
great deal better than him; and he could make songs in English as well
as in Irish; Raftery would run from where Callinan was. And he was a
nice respectable man, too, with cows and sheep, and a kind man. _He_
would never put anything that wasn't nice into a poem, and _he_ would
never run anyone down; but if you were the worst in the world, he'd make
you the best in it; and when his wife lost her beetle, he made a song of
fifteen verses about it.'

'Well,' the Kilchreest old woman admitted, 'Raftery would run people
down; he was someway bitter; and if he had anything against a person,
he'd give him a great lacerating. But there were more for him than for
Callinan; some used to say Callinan's songs were too long.'

'I tell you,' said the other, 'Callinan was a nice man and a nice
neighbour. Raftery wasn't fit to put beside him. Callinan was a man that
would go out of his own back door, and make a poem about the four
quarters of the earth. I tell you, you would stand in the snow to listen
to Callinan!' But, just then, a bedridden old woman suddenly sat up and
began to sing Raftery's 'Bridget Vesach' as long as her breath lasted;
so the last word was for him after all.

Raftery died over sixty years ago; but there are many old people still
living, besides those two old women, who have seen him, and who keep his
songs in their memory. What they tell of him shows how closely he was in
the old tradition of the bards, the wandering poets of two thousand
years or more. His satire, his praises, his competitions with other
poets were the dread and the pride of many Galway and Mayo parishes. And
now the songs that he never wrote down, being blind, are known, if not
as our people say, 'all over the world,' at least in all places where
Irish is spoken.

Raftery's satires, as I have heard them repeated by the country people,
do not seem, even in their rhymed original--he only composed in
Irish--to have the 'sharp spur' of some of his pr