ere. That is what
the English wanted the time they went to war; they want to close up the
minerals for themselves. If it wasn't for the war, that pension would
never be given to Ireland. They'd have been driven home by the Boers if
it wasn't for the Irish that were in the front of every battle. And the
Irish held out better too, they can starve better than the rest, there
is more bearing in them. It wasn't till all the Irish were killed that
the English took to bribing. Bribed Botha they did with a bag of gold.
For all the generals in England that are any good are Irish. Buller was
the last they had, and he died. They can find no good generals at all in
England, unless they might get them very young."

ANOTHER THOUGHT

"It was old money was in the Treasury idle, and the King and Queen
getting old wanted to distribute it in the country it was taken from.
But some say it was money belonging to captains and big men that died in
the war and left no will after them. Anyway it is likely it will not
hold; and it is known that a great many of those that get it die very
soon."

A PROPHECY

"It is likely there will be a war at the end of the two thousand, that
was always foretold. And I hear the English are making ships that will
dive the same as diving ducks under the water. But as to the Irish
Americans, they would sweep the entire world; and England is afraid of
America, it being a neighbour."

NOTES

I have given this book its name because it is at my own door, in the
Barony of Kiltartan, I have heard a great number of the stories from
beggars, pipers, travelling men, and such pleasant company. But others I
have heard in the Workhouse, or to the north of Galway Bay, in
Connemara, or on its southern coast, in Burren. I might, perhaps, better
have called the little book Myths in the Making.

A sociable people given to conversation and belief; no books in the
house, no history taught in the schools; it is likely that must have
been the way of it in old Greece, when the king of highly civilised
Crete was turned by tradition into a murderous tyrant owning a monster
and a labyrinth. It was the way of it in old France too, one thinks,
when Charlemagne's height grew to eight feet, and his years were counted
by centuries: "He is three hundred years old, and when will he weary of
war?" Anyhow, it has been the way of modern Ireland--the Ireland I
know--and when I hear myth turned into history, or history into myth, I
see