He and all the neighbours were glad to hear that there is soon to be a stone over the grave.  ‘He is worthy of it; he is well worthy of it,’ they kept saying.  A man who was digging sand by the roadside, took me to his house, and his wife showed me a little book, in which the ‘Repentance’ and other poems had been put down for her, in phonetic Irish, by a beggar who had once stayed in the house.  ’Many who go to America hear Raftery’s songs sung out there,’ they told me with pride.

As I went back along the silent road, there was suddenly a sound of horses and a rushing and waving about me, and I found myself in the midst of the County Galway Fox Hounds, coming back from cub-hunting.  The English M.F.H. and his wife rode by; and I wondered if they had ever heard of the poet whose last road this had been.  Most likely not; for it is only among the people that his name has been kept in remembrance.

There is still a peasant poet here and there, making songs in the ’sweet Irish tongue,’ in which death spoke to Raftery; and I think these will be held in greater honour as the time of awakening goes on.  But the nineteenth century has been a time of swift change in many countries; and in looking back on that century in Ireland, there seem to have been two great landslips—­the breaking of the continuity of the social life of the people by the famine, and the breaking of the continuity of their intellectual life by the shoving out of the language.  It seems as if there were no place left now for the wandering versemaker, and that Raftery may have closed the long procession that had moved unbroken during so many centuries, on its journey to ‘the meadow of the dead.’

1900.

* * * * *

It was after I had written this that I went to see Raftery’s birthplace, Cilleaden, in the County Mayo.

A cousin of his came to see me, and some other men, but none of them remembered him; but they were very proud of his song on Cilleaden, which ‘is all through the world.’  An old woman told me she had heard it in a tramcar in America; and an old man said:  ’I was coming back from England one time, and there were a lot of Irish-speaking boys from Galway on board.  There was one of them sick all through the night, but he was well in the morning; and the others came round him and asked him for a song, and the song he gave was ‘Cilleaden.’

They did not seem to know many of his other songs, except the ‘Repentance,’ which someone remembered having seen sold as a ballad, with the English on one side and the Irish on the other.  And one man told me:  ’The first song Raftery wrote was about a hat that was stole from a man that was working in that middle field beyond.  When the man was digging, he used to put his hat on a stick in the field to frighten away the crows; and Raftery got someone to bring away the hat, to make fun of the man.  And then he made a song, making out it was the fairies had taken it; and he made the man follow them to Cruachmaa, and from that to Roscommon, and tell all that happened him there.’