His knowledge and his poetic gift are often supposed to have been given to him by the invisible powers, who grow visible to those who have lost their earthly sight.  An old woman who had often danced to his music, said:—­’When he went to his rest at night, it’s then he’d make the songs in the turn of a hand, and you would wonder in the morning where he got them.’  And a man who ’was too much taken up with sport and hurling when he was a boy to think much about him,’ says:  ’He got the gift.  It’s said he was asked which would he choose, music or the talk.  If he chose music, he would have been the greatest musician in the world; but he chose the talk, and so he was a great poet.  Where could he have found all the words he put in his songs if it wasn’t for that?’ An old woman, who is more orthodox, says:—­’I often used to see him when I was a little child, in my father’s house at Corker.  He’d often come in there, and here to Coole House he used to come as well.  He couldn’t see a stim, and that is why he had such great knowledge.  God gave it to him.  And his songs have gone all through the world; and he had a voice that was like the wind.’

Legends are already growing up about his death.  It has been said that ’he knew the very day his time would be up; and he went to Galway, and brought a plank to the house he was stopping at, and he put it in the loft; and he told the people of the house his time was come, and bid them make a coffin for him with the plank—­and he was dead before morning.’  And another story says he died alone in an empty house, and that flames were seen about the house all night; and ’the flames were the angels waking him.’  But many told me he had died in the house of a man near Craughwell; and one autumn day I went there to look for it, and the first person I asked was able to tell me that the house where Raftery had died was the other side of Craughwell, a mile and a half away.  It was a warm, hazy day; and as I walked along the flat, deserted road that Raftery had often walked, I could see few landmarks—­only a few more grey rocks, or a few more stunted hazel bushes in one stone-walled field than in another.  At last I came to a thatched cottage; and when I saw an old man sitting outside it, with hat and coat of the old fashion, I felt sure it was he who had been with Raftery at the last.  He was ready to talk about him, and told me how he had come there to die.  ’I was a young chap at that time.  It must have been in the year 1835, for my father died in ’36, and I think it was a year before him that Raftery died.  What did he die of?  Of weakness.  He had been bet up in Galway with some fit of sickness he had; and then he came to gather a little money about the country, and when he got here he was bet up again.  He wasn’t an old man—­only about seventy years.  He was in the bed for about a fortnight.  When he got bad, my father said it was best get a priest for him; but the parish priest was away.  But we saw Father Nagle passing the road, and I went