The beautiful hills and valleys of Galicia inspire her children with such a wild and passionate love of home as I have never met with elsewhere. Emigrants from all countries suffer more or less from home-sickness, but it is only the emigrants of Galicia who die of it. Yes, many and many a Gallegan peasant has died of sadness because he could not return to his native land. This home-sickness is a real malady, it has a special name in the Gallegan language; it is called _morriña_.[198] It is not surprising, then, that Galicia’s sons far away in Cuba should have collected money to raise a monument to the memory of a poetess who expressed their woes with such idyllic sweetness, and in the melodious dialect of their dear native province that they had learned as children at their mother’s knee. And this fervent appreciation of the poetess is no mere local cult; it goes wherever a Gallegan goes, it accompanies the emigrants as they embark for other shores, and the name of Rosalia Castro is honoured wherever Gallegans are to be found. Rosalia Castro was brought up at Padron, and it was there that she breathed her last; a tablet on the house that she lived in bears the date of her death, 15th July 1885. Her earliest work, and perhaps her best, was a small volume of popular poems entitled _Cantares Gallegas_: she also wrote a book entitled _As Viudas d’os vivos e as viudas d’os mortos_ (“The Widows of the Living and the Widows of the Dead”). Rosalia began to write poetry at the age of eleven. At the age of twenty she was married to Señor Murguia. Her death occurred in her forty-eighth year. She published several novels, and wrote a great deal more poetry than was ever published, but before her death she expressed a wish that all her unpublished writings might be burned--and her friends respected this wish. _Follas Novas_ is perhaps her most popular volume; it consists of a collection of short lyrics. I tried hard to buy a copy, but it has long been out of print, and was not to be had even in Madrid. Failde[199] relates that a man who possessed a copy, being asked to sell it, replied that he would not part with it for its weight in gold. The only one of Rosalia’s books which reached a second edition is her first, _Cantares Gallegas_, but that, too, is now out of print. Both of these volumes were, however, lent to me during my stay in Galicia, and from them I copied a few of the lyrics that pleased me most. So well are the _Cantares_ known in Galicia, that every one of them has become a part of the folklore of the province. “We hear them sung,” writes Failde, “in the most lonely villages on the most distant heights, and in the largest towns.” Yet Rosalia was not Galicia’s only poetess; contemporary with her were Sofia Casanova, who is still living, Narcisa Perez de Reoyo, “whose life was that of a flower,” Avelina Valladares, and Filomena Dato Muruáis, whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making during my visit to Orense.