or defeat; since the Gael were sold at Aughrim, and since
Owen Roe died, the Branch.'

V.

His life was always the wandering, homeless life of the old bards. After
Cromwell's time, as the houses they went to grew poorer, they had added
music to their verse-making; and Raftery's little fiddle helped to make
him welcome in the Ireland which was, in spite of many sorrows, as merry
and light-hearted up to the time of the great famine as England had been
up to the time of the Puritans. 'He had no place of his own,' I am told,
'but to be walking the country. He did well to die before the bad years
came. He used to play at Kiltartan cross for the dancing of a Sunday
evening. And when he'd come to any place, the people would gather and
he'd give them a dance; for there was three times as many people in the
world then as what there is now. The people would never have let him
want; but as to money, what could he do with it, and he with no place of
his own?' An old woman near Craughwell says: 'He used to come here
often; it was like home to him. He wouldn't have a dance then; my father
liked better to be sitting listening to his talk and his stories; only
when we'd come in, he'd take the fiddle and say: "Now we must give the
youngsters a tune."' And an old man, who is still lamenting the fall in
prices after the Battle of Waterloo, remembers having seen him 'one time
at a shebeen house that used to be down there in Clonerle. He was
playing the fiddle, and there used to be two couples at a time dancing;
and they would put two halfpence in the plate, and Raftery would rattle
them and say: "It's good for the two sorts to be together," and there
would be great laughing.' And it is also said 'there was a welcome
before him in every house he'd come to; and wherever he went, they'd
think the time too short he would be with them.' There is a story I
often hear told about the marriage near Cappaghtagle of a poor servant
boy and girl, 'that was only a marriage and not a wedding, till Raftery
chanced to come in; and he made it one. There wasn't a bit but bread and
herrings in the house; but he made a great song about the grand feast
they had, and he put every sort of thing into the song--all the beef
that was in Ireland; and went to the Claddagh, and didn't leave a fish
in the sea. And there was no one at all at it; but he brought all the
_bacach_ and poor men in Ireland, and gave them a pound each. He went to
bed after, without them