This evening we had a dance in the inn parlour, where a fire had been lighted and the tables had been pushed into the corners.  There was no master of the ceremonies, and when I had played two or three jigs and other tunes on my fiddle, there was a pause, as I did not know how much of my music the people wanted, or who else could be got to sing or play.  For a moment a deadlock seemed to be coming, but a young girl I knew fairly well saw my difficulty, and took the management of our festivities into her hands.  At first she asked a coastguard’s daughter to play a reel on the mouth organ, which she did at once with admirable spirit and rhythm.  Then the little girl asked me to play again, telling me what I should choose, and went on in the same way managing the evening till she thought it was time to go home.  Then she stood up, thanked me in Irish, and walked out of the door, without looking at anybody, but followed almost at once by the whole party.

When they had gone I sat for a while on a barrel in the public-house talking to some young men who were reading a paper in Irish.  Then I had a long evening with the scholar and two story-tellers—­both old men who had been pilots—­taking down stories and poems.  We were at work for nearly six hours, and the more matter we got the more the old men seemed to remember.

‘I was to go out fishing tonight,’ said the younger as he came in, ’but I promised you to come, and you’re a civil man, so I wouldn’t take five pounds to break my word to you.  And now’—­taking up his glass of whisky—­’here’s to your good health, and may you live till they make you a coffin out of a gooseberry bush, or till you die in childbed.’

They drank my health and our work began.

‘Have you heard tell of the poet MacSweeny?’ said the same man, sitting down near me.

‘I have,’ I said, ‘in the town of Galway.’

‘Well,’ he said, ’I’ll tell you his piece “The Big Wedding,” for it’s a fine piece and there aren’t many that know it.  There was a poor servant girl out in the country, and she got married to a poor servant boy.  MacSweeny knew the two of them, and he was away at that time and it was a month before he came back.  When he came back he went to see Peggy O’Hara—­that was the name of the girl—­and he asked her if they had had a great wedding.  Peggy said it was only middling, but they hadn’t forgotten him all the same, and she had a bottle of whisky for him in the cupboard.  He sat down by the fire and began drinking the whisky.  When he had a couple of glasses taken and was warm by the fire, he began making a song, and this was the song he made about the wedding of Peggy O’Hara.’

He had the poem both in English and Irish, but as it has been found elsewhere and attributed to another folk-poet, I need not give it.

We had another round of porter and whisky, and then the old man who had MacSweeny’s wedding gave us a bit of a drinking song, which the scholar took down and I translated with him afterwards:—­