The old man went on telling of his experiences at sea and the places he had been to.

‘If I had my life to live over again,’ he said, ’there’s no other way I’d spend it.  I went in and out everywhere and saw everything.  I was never afraid to take my glass, though I was never drunk in my life, and I was a great player of cards though I never played for money’

‘There’s no diversion at all in cards if you don’t play for money’ said the man in the corner.

‘There was no use in my playing for money’ said the old man, ’for I’d always lose, and what’s the use in playing if you always lose?’

Then our conversation branched off to the Irish language and the books written in it.

He began to criticise Archbishop MacHale’s version of Moore’s Irish Melodies with great severity and acuteness, citing whole poems both in the English and Irish, and then giving versions that he had made himself.

‘A translation is no translation,’ he said, ’unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.  In my translation you won’t find a foot or a syllable that’s not in the English, yet I’ve put down all his words mean, and nothing but it.  Archbishop MacHale’s work is a most miserable production.’

From the verses he cited his judgment seemed perfectly justified, and even if he was wrong, it is interesting to note that this poor sailor and night-watchman was ready to rise up and criticise an eminent dignitary and scholar on rather delicate points of versification and the finer distinctions between old words of Gaelic.

In spite of his singular intelligence and minute observation his reasoning was medieval.

I asked him what he thought about the future of the language on these islands.

‘It can never die out,’ said he, ’because there’s no family in the place can live without a bit of a field for potatoes, and they have only the Irish words for all that they do in the fields.  They sail their new boats—­their hookers—­in English, but they sail a curagh oftener in Irish, and in the fields they have the Irish alone.  It can never die out, and when the people begin to see it fallen very low, it will rise up again like the phoenix from its own ashes.’

‘And the Gaelic League?’ I asked him.

’The Gaelic League!  Didn’t they come down here with their organisers and their secretaries, and their meetings and their speechifyings, and start a branch of it, and teach a power of Irish for five weeks and a half!’ [a]

‘What do we want here with their teaching Irish?’ said the man in the corner; ‘haven’t we Irish enough?’

‘You have not,’ said the old man; ’there’s not a soul in Aran can count up to nine hundred and ninety-nine without using an English word but myself.’

It was getting late, and the rain had lessened for a moment, so I groped my way back to the inn through the intense darkness of a late autumn night.