ing. He used to play the fiddle
for Frank Taafe that lived here, when he would be going out riding, and
the horse used to prance when he heard it. And he made verses against
one Seaghan Bradach, that used to be paid thirteen pence for every head
of cattle he found straying in the Jordan's fields, and used to drive
them in himself. There was another poet called Devine that praised
Seaghan Bradach; and a verse was made against him again by a woman-poet
that lived here at the time.'

* * * * *

There is a stone over Raftery's grave now; and the people about
Killeenan gather there on a Sunday in August every year to do honour to
his memory. This year they established a _Feis_; and there were prizes
given for traditional singing, and for old poems repeated, and old
stories told, all in the Irish tongue.

And the _Craoibhin Aoibhin_ is printing week by week all of Raftery's
poems that can be found, with translations, and we shall soon have them
in a book.

And he has written a little play, having Raftery for its subject; and at
a Galway Feis this year he himself acted, and took the blind poet's
part; and he will act it many times again, _le congnamh De_--with the
help of God.

1902.

WEST IRISH BALLADS.

It was only a few years ago, when Douglas Hyde published his literal
translations of Connacht Love Songs, that I realized that, while I had
thought poetry was all but dead in Ireland, the people about me had been
keeping up the lyrical tradition that existed in Ireland before Chaucer
lived. While I had been looking in the columns of Nationalist newspapers
for some word of poetic promise, they had been singing songs of love and
sorrow in the language that has been pushed nearer and nearer to the
western seaboard--the edge of the world. 'Eyes have we, but we see not;
ears have we, but we do not understand.' It does not comfort me to think
how many besides myself, having spent a lifetime in Ireland, must make
this confession.

The ballads to be gathered now are a very few out of the great mass of
traditional poetry that was swept away during the last century in the
merciless sweeping away of the Irish tongue, and of all that was bound
up with it, by England's will, by Ireland's need, by official pedantry.

To give an idea of the ballads of to-day, I will not quote from the
translations of Douglas Hyde or of Dr. Sigerson already published. I
will rather give a few of the more hom