’O Donall og, it is I would be better to you than a high, proud,
     spendthrift lady:  I would milk the cow; I would bring help to you;
     and if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you.

     ’O, ochone, and it’s not with hunger or with wanting food, or
     drink, or sleep, that I am growing thin, and my life is shortened;
     but it is the love of a young man has withered me away.

     ’It is early in the morning that I saw him coming, going along the
     road on the back of a horse; he did not come to me; he made nothing
     of me; and it is on my way home that I cried my fill.

     ’When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness, I sit down and I go
     through my trouble; when I see the world and do not see my boy, he
     that has an amber shade in his hair.

     ’It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you; the Sunday that is
     last before Easter Sunday.  And myself on my knees reading the
     Passion; and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

     ’O, aya! my mother, give myself to him; and give him all that you
     have in the world; get out yourself to ask for alms, and do not
     come back and forward looking for me.

     ’My mother said to me not to be talking with you to-day, or
     to-morrow, or on the Sunday; it was a bad time she took for telling
     me that; it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

     ’My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe, or as the black
     coal that is on the smith’s forge; or as the sole of a shoe left in
     white halls; it was you put that darkness over my life.

’You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me; you have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me; and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!

1901.

JACOBITE BALLADS.

I was looking the other day through a collection of poems, lately taken down from Irish-speaking country people for the Oireactas, the great yearly meeting of the Gaelic League; and a line in one of them seemed strange to me:  ‘Prebaim mo chroidhe le mo Stuart glegeal,’ ’my heart leaps up with my bright Stuart’; for I did not know there was still a memory of James and Charles among the people.  The refrain of the poem was:  ‘Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!’ and these are some of its verses:—­

’There are young girls through the whole country would sit alongside of me through a half-hour, till we would be telling you the story together of what it was put myself under trouble; I make my complaints, wanting my comrade.  Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!

     ’Where are my people that were wise and learned?  Where is the troop
     readying their spears, that they do not smooth out this knot for
     me?  Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!