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 giving him a drop to drink; but he didn’t mind that when they hadn’t got it to give.’

The wandering, unrestrained life was probably to his mind; and I do not think there is a word of discontent or complaint in any of his verses, though he was always poor, and must often have known hardship.  In the ‘Talk with the Bush,’ he describes in his whimsical, exaggerated way, a wetting, which must have been one of very many.

     ’It chanced that I was travelling and the rain was heavy; I stepped
     aside, and not without reason, till I’d get a wall or a bush that
     would shelter me.

’I didn’t meet at the side of a gap only an old, withered, miserable bush by the side of the wall, and it bent with the west wind.  I stepped under it, and it was a wet place; torrents of rain coming down from all quarters, east and west and straight downwards; its equal I couldn’t see, unless it is seeds winnowed through a riddle.  It was sharp, angry, fierce, and stormy, like a deer running and racing past me.  The storm was drowning the country, and my case was pitiful, and I suffering without cause.

’An hour and a quarter it was raining; there isn’t a drop that fell but would fill a quart and put a heap on it afterwards; there’s not a wheat or rape mill in the neighbourhood but it would set going in the middle of a field.’

At last relief comes:—­