out and brought him in, and he gave him absolution, and anointed him.  He had no pain; only his feet were cold, and the boys used to be warming a stone in the fire and putting it to them in the bed.  My mother wanted to send to Galway, where his wife and his daughter and his son were stopping, so that they would come and care him; but he wouldn’t have them.  Someway he didn’t think they treated him well.’

I had been told that the priest had refused him absolution when he was dying, until he forgave some enemy; and that he had said afterwards, ’If I forgave him with my mouth, I didn’t with my heart’; but this was not true.  ’Father Nagle made no delay in anointing him; but there was a carpenter down the road there he said too much to, and annoyed him one time; and the carpenter had a touch of the poet too, and was a great singer, and he came out and beat him, and broke his fiddle; and I remember when he was dying, the priest bringing in the carpenter, and making them forgive one another, and shake hands; and the carpenter said:  “If two brothers were to have a falling out, they’d forgive one another—­and why wouldn’t we?” He was buried in Killeenan; it wasn’t a very big funeral, but all the people of the village came to it.  He used often to come and stop with us....  It was of a Christmas Eve he died:  and he had always said that, if God had a hand in it, it was of a Christmas Day he’d die.’

I went to Killeenan to look for his grave.  There is nothing to mark it; but two old men who had been at his funeral pointed it out to me.  There is a ruined church in the graveyard, which is crowded; ’there are people killing one another now to get a place in it.’  I was asked into a house close by; and its owner said with almost a touch of jealousy:  ’I think it was coming in here Raftery was the time he died; but he got bet up, and turned in at the house below.  It was of a Christmas Eve he died, and that shows he was blessed; there’s a blessing on them that die at Christmas.  It was at night he was buried, for Christmas Day no work could be done, but my father and a few others made a little gathering to pay for a coffin, and it was made by a man in the village on St. Stephen’s Day; and then he was brought here, and the people from the villages followed him, for they all had a wish for Raftery.  But night was coming on when they got here; and in digging the grave there was a big stone in it, and the boys thought they would put him in a barn and take the night out of him.  But my mother—­the Lord have mercy on her—­had a great veneration for Raftery; and she sent out two mould candles lighted; for in those days the women used to have their own mould, and to make their own candles for Christmas.  And we held the candles there where the grave is, near the gable end of the church; and my brother went down in the grave and got the stone out, and we buried him.  And there was a sharp breeze blowing at the time, but it never quenched the candles or moved the flame of them, and that shows that the Lord had a hand in him.’