An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the faeries) at night, says, “Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing ever made.  My mother used to tell me about her, for she’d be at every hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white.  As many as eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn’t have any of them.  There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night, sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found him dead there in the morning.  She died of the fever that was before the famine.”  Another old man says he was only a child when he saw her, but he remembered that “the strongest man that was among us, one John Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee.”  This is perhaps the man the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes.  There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old poem said, “the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of the wolves,” but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of ancient speech.  She says, “The sun and the moon never shone on anybody so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she had two little blushes on her cheeks.”  And an old wrinkled woman who lives close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says, “I often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed.  She had two bunches of curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver.  I saw Mary Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that was in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely creature.  I was at her wake too—­she had seen too much of the world.  She was a kind creature.  One day I was coming home through that field beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal (the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk.”  This old woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of silver, for though I knew an old man—­he is dead now—­who thought she might know “the cure for all the evils in the world,” that the Sidhe knew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour.  But a man by the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says, “Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold.  She was poor, but her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness.  And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with her, but she died young.  It is said that no one that has a song made about them will ever live long.”