w; but it is a great
thing you to die from me when I had given you my love entirely.

'It is no wonder a broken heart to be with your father and your
mother; the white-breasted mother that crooned you, and you a baby;
your wedded wife, O thousand treasures, that never set out your
bed; and the day you went to Trabawn, how well it failed you to
come home.

'Your eyes are with the eels, and your lips with the crabs; and
your two white hands under the sharp rule of the salmon. Five
pounds I would give to him that would find my true love. Ohone! it
is you are a sharp grief to young Mary ni-Curtain!'

Some men and women who were drowned in the river Corrib, on their way to
a fair at Galway, in the year 1820, have still their names kept green in
a ballad:--

'Mary Ruane, that you would stand in a fair to look at, the
best-dressed woman in the place; John Cosgrave, the best a woman
ever reared; your mother thought that if a hundred were drowned,
your swimming would take the sway; but the boat went down, and
when I got up early on Friday, I heard the keening and the clapping
of women's hands, with the women that were drowsy and tired after
the night there, without doing anything but laying out the dead.'

There are laments for other things besides death. A man taken up 'not
for sheep-stealing or any crime, but just for making a drop of
_poteen_,' tells of his hardships in Galway gaol. A lover who has
enlisted because he cannot get the girl he loves--'a pity I not to be
going to Galway with my heart's love on my arm'--tells of his hardships
in the army: 'The first day I enlisted I was well pleased and satisfied;
the second day I was vexed and tormented; and the third day I would have
given a pound if I had it to get my pardon.' And I have heard a song
'made by a woman out of her wits, that lost her husband and married
again, and her three sons enlisted,' who cannot forgive herself for
having driven them from home. 'If it was in Ballinakill I had your
bones, I would not be half so much tormented after you; but you to be
standing in the army of the Gall, and getting nothing after it but the
bit in your mouth.'

Here is a song of daily life, in which a girl laments the wandering and
covetous appetite of her cow:--

'It is following after the white cow I spent last night; and,
indeed, all I got by it was the bones of an old goose.