edecessors, such as
O'Higinn, whose tongue was cut out by men from Sligo, who had suffered
from it, or O'Daly, who criticised the poverty of the Irish chiefs in
the sixteenth century until the servant of one of them stuck a knife
into his throat. Yet they were much dreaded. 'He was very sharp with
anyone that didn't please him,' I have been told; 'and no one would like
to be put in his songs.' And though it is said of his songs in praise of
his friends that 'whoever he praised was well praised,' it was thought
safer that one's own name should not appear in them. The man at whose
house he died said to me: 'He used often to come and stop with us, but
he never made a verse about us; my father wouldn't have liked that.
Someway it doesn't bring luck.' And another man says: 'My father often
told me about Raftery. He was someway gifted, and people were afraid of
him. I was often told by men that gave him a lift in their car when they
overtook him now and again, that if he asked their name, they wouldn't
give it, for fear he might put it in a song.' And another man says:
'There was a friend of my father's was driving his car on the road one
day, and he saw Raftery, but he didn't let on to see him. But when he
was passing, Raftery said: "There was never a soldier marching but would
get his billet. But the rabbit has an enemy in the ferret;" so then the
man said in a hurry, "Oh, Mr. Raftery, I never knew it was you: won't
you get up and take a seat in the car?"' A girl in whose praise he had
made a song, Mary Hynes, of Ballylee, died young, and had a troubled
life; and one of her neighbours says of her: 'No one that has a song
made about them will ever live long;' and another says: 'She got a great
tossing up and down; and at last she died in the middle of a bog.' They
tell, too, of a bush that he once took shelter under from the rain, and
how he 'praised it first; and then when it let the rain down, he
dispraised it, and it withered up, and never put out leaf or branch
after.' I have seen his poem on the bush in a manuscript book, carefully
written in the beautiful Irish character, and the great treasure of a
stonecutter's cottage. This is the form of the curse: 'I pronounce
ugliness upon you. That bloom or leaf may never grow on you, but the
flame of the mountain fires and of bonfires be upon you. That you may
get your punishment from Oscar's flail, to hack and to bruise you with
the big sledge of a forge.'

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