And one of them told me:  ’He was six years old when the smallpox took his sight from him; and he was marked very little by the pox, only three or four little marks—­it seemed to settle in his eyes.  His father was a cottier—­there were many here in those times.  His mother was a Brennan.  There are cousins of his living yet; but in the schools they are Englished into Rochford.’

A young man said he had been told Raftery was born in some place beyond, at the foot of the mountain, but the others were very indignant; one got very angry, and said:  ’Don’t I know where he was born, and my father was the one age with him, and they sisters’ sons; and isn’t Michael Conroy there below his cousin? and it’s up in that field was the house he was born in, so don’t be trying to bring him away to the mountain.’

I went to see the birthplace, a very green field, with two thorn bushes growing close together by a stone.  The field is called ’Sean Straid’—­the old street—­for a few cottages had stood there.  A man who lives close by told me he had dug up a blackened stone just there, and a stone into which a bar had been let, to hang a pot on; and that may have been the very hearth where Raftery had sat as a child.

I found one old man who remembered him.  ’He used to come to my father’s house often, mostly from Easter to Whitsuntide, when the cakes were made, and there would be music and dancing.  He used to play the fiddle for Frank Taafe that lived here, when he would be going out riding, and the horse used to prance when he heard it.  And he made verses against one Seaghan Bradach, that used to be paid thirteen pence for every head of cattle he found straying in the Jordan’s fields, and used to drive them in himself.  There was another poet called Devine that praised Seaghan Bradach; and a verse was made against him again by a woman-poet that lived here at the time.’

* * * * *

There is a stone over Raftery’s grave now; and the people about Killeenan gather there on a Sunday in August every year to do honour to his memory.  This year they established a Feis; and there were prizes given for traditional singing, and for old poems repeated, and old stories told, all in the Irish tongue.

And the Craoibhin Aoibhin is printing week by week all of Raftery’s poems that can be found, with translations, and we shall soon have them in a book.

And he has written a little play, having Raftery for its subject; and at a Galway Feis this year he himself acted, and took the blind poet’s part; and he will act it many times again, le congnamh De—­with the help of God.

1902.

WEST IRISH BALLADS.