"Or this?" Marsh interrupted, taking up the manuscript again. "Galway sent these translations to me so that I might be the first to see them. He always does that. This one is called 'Lullaby of a Woman of the Mountain.'" Little gold head, my house's candle, You will guide all wayfarers that walk this country. Little soft mouth that my breast has known, Mary will kiss you as she passes. Little round cheek, O smoother than satin, Iosa will lay His hand upon you. Mary's kiss on my baby's mouth, Christ's little hand on my darling's cheek! House, be still, and ye little grey mice, Lie close to-night in your hidden lairs. Moths on the window, fold your wings, Little black chafers, silence your humming. Plover and curlew fly not over my house, Do not speak, wild barnacle, passing over this mountain. Things of the mountain that wake in the night time, Do not stir to-night till the daylight whitens. "That's alive, isn't it?" Marsh, now openly angry, demanded. "Do you think that song doesn't kindle the hearts of mothers all over the world?... I can imagine Eve crooning it to little Cain and Abel, and I can imagine a woman in the Combe crooning it to her child!..." The Combe was a tract of slum in Dublin. "It's universal and everlasting. You can't kill that!" "Then why has it got lost?" "It isn't lost--it's only covered up. Our task is to dig it out. It's worth digging out, isn't it? The people in the West still sing songs like that. Isn't it worth while to try and get all our people to sing them instead of singing English music-hall stuff?..." 2 It was in that spirit that Marsh started the Gaelic class in Ballymartin. "And the Gaelic games," he said to Henry, "we'll revive them too!" Twice a week, he taught the rudiments of the Irish language to a mixed class of boys and girls, and every Saturday he led the Ballymartin hurley team into one of Mr. Quinn's fields.... There had been difficulty in establishing the mixed classes. The farmers and the villagers, having first declared that Gaelic was useless to them--"they'd be a lot better learnin' shorthand!" said John McCracken--then declared that they did not care to have their daughters "trapesin' about the loanies, lettin' on to be learnin' Irish, an' them only up to devilment with the lads!" But Marsh overcame that difficulty, as he overcame most of his difficulties, by persistent attack; and in the end, the Gaelic class was established, and the Ballymartin boys and girls were set to the study of O'Growney's primer. Henry was employed as Marsh's monitor. His duty was to supervise the elementary pupils, leaving the more advanced ones to the care of Marsh. It was while he was teaching the Gaelic alphabet to his class, that Henry first met Sheila Morgan.