’There is a marriage portion coming home for Donough,
    But it is not cattle nor sheep nor horses;
    But tobacco and pipes and white candles,
    And it will not be begrudged to them that will use it.’

A very pathetic touch is given by the idea of the ‘marriage portion,’ the provision for the wake, being brought home for the dead boy.

But it is chiefly in Aran, and on the opposite Connemara coast, that Irish ballads are still being made as well as sung.  The little rock islands of Aran are fit strongholds for the threatened language, breakwaters of Europe, taking as they do the first onset of the ocean ‘that hath no limits nearer than America.’  The fisher-folk go out in their canvas curraghs to win a living from the Atlantic, or painfully carry loads of sand and seaweed to make the likeness of an earth-plot on the bare rock.  The Irish coast seems far away; the setting sun very near.  When a sea-fog blots out the mainland for a day, a feeling grows that the island may have slipped anchor, and have drifted into unfamiliar seas.  The fisher-folk are not the only dwellers upon the islands; they are the home, the chosen resting-place, of ‘the Others,’ the Fairies, the Fallen Angels, the mighty Sidhe.  From here they sweep across the sea, invisible or taking at pleasure the form of a cloud, of a full-rigged ship, of a company of policemen, of a flock of gulls.  Sometimes they only play with mortals; sometimes they help them.  But often, often, the fatal touch is given to the first-born child, or to the young man in his strength, or the girl in her beauty, or the young mother in her pride; and the call is heard to leave the familiar fireside life for the whirling, vain, unresting life of the irresistible host.

It is, perhaps, because of the very mistiness and dreaminess of their surroundings, the almost unearthly silences, the fantasy of story and of legend that lie about them, that the people of Aran and the Galway coast almost shrink from idealism in their fireside songs, and choose rather to dwell upon the slight incidents of daily life.  It is in the songs of the greener plains that the depths of passion and heights of idealism have been reached.

It is at weddings that songs are most in use—­even the saddest not being thought out of place; and at the evening gathering in one cottage or another, while the pipe, lighted at the turf-fire, is passed from hand to hand.  Here is one that is a great favourite, though very simple, and somewhat rugged in metre; for it touches on the chief events of an islander’s life—­emigration, loss of life by sea, the land jealousy.  It is called ‘a sorrowful song that Bridget O’Malley made’; and she tells in it of her troubles at the Boston factory, of her lasting sorrow for her drowned brothers, and her as lasting anger against her sister’s husband.