All the morning I have been digging maidenhair ferns with a boy I met on the rocks, who was in great sorrow because his father died suddenly a week ago of a pain in his heart.

’We wouldn’t have chosen to lose our father for all the gold there is in the world,’ he said, ’and it’s great loneliness and sorrow there is in the house now.’

Then he told me that a brother of his who is a stoker in the Navy had come home a little while before his father died, and that he had spent all his money in having a fine funeral, with plenty of drink at it, and tobacco.

‘My brother has been a long way in the world,’ he said, ’and seen great wonders.  He does be telling us of the people that do come out to them from Italy, and Spain, and Portugal, and that it is a sort of Irish they do be talking—­not English at all—­though it is only a word here and there you’d understand.’

When we had dug out enough of roots from the deep crannies in the rocks where they are only to be found, I gave my companion a few pence, and sent him back to his cottage.

The old man who tells me the Irish poems is curiously pleased with the translations I have made from some of them.

He would never be tired, he says, listening while I would be reading them, and they are much finer things than his old bits of rhyme.

Here is one of them, as near the Irish as I am able to make it:—­

  Rucard mor.

  I put the sorrow of destruction on the bad luck,
  For it would be a pity ever to deny it,
  It is to me it is stuck,
  By loneliness my pain, my complaining.

  It is the fairy-host
  Put me a-wandering
  And took from me my goods of the world.

  At Mannistir na Ruaidthe
  It is on me the shameless deed was done: 
  Finn Bheara and his fairy-host
  Took my little horse on me from under the bag.

  If they left me the skin
  It would bring me tobacco for three months,
  But they did not leave anything with me
  But the old minister in its place.

  Am not I to be pitied? 
  My bond and my note are on her,
  And the price of her not yet paid,
  My loneliness, my pain, my complaining.

  The devil a hill or a glen, or highest fort
  Ever was built in Ireland,
  Is not searched on me for my mare;
  And I am still at my complaining.

  I got up in the morning,
  I put a red spark in my pipe. 
  I went to the Cnoc-Maithe
  To get satisfaction from them.

  I spoke to them,
  If it was in them to do a right thing,
  To get me my little mare,
  Or I would be changing my wits.

  ’Do you hear, Rucard Mor? 
  It is not here is your mare,
  She is in Cnoc Bally Brishlawn
  With the fairy-men these three months.’

  I ran on in my walking,
  I followed the road straightly,
  I was in Glenasmoil
  Before the moon was ended.