An Aran man, repeating to me _The Grief of a Girl's Heart_ in Irish told me it was with that song his mother had often sung him to sleep as a child. It was from an old woman who had known Mary Hynes and who said of her "The sun and the moon never shone upon anything so handsome" that I first heard Raftery's song of praise of her, "The pearl that was at Ballylee," a song "that has gone around the world & as far as America." It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters. It was to a working farmer's house I walked on many a moonlit evening with the manuscript that his greater knowledge helped me to understand and by his hearth that I read for the first time the _Vision of Death_ and the _Lament for O'Daly._ After that I met with many old people who had in the days before the Famine seen or talked with the wandering poet who was in the succession of those who had made and recited their lyrics on the Irish roads before Chaucer wrote. V And so I came by the road nearest me to the old legends, the old heroic poems. It was a man of a hundred years who told me the story of Cuchulain's fight with his own son, the son of Aoife, and how the young man as he lay dying had reproached him and said "Did you not see how I threw every spear fair and easy at you, and you threw your spear hard and wicked at me? And I did not come out to tell my name to one or to two but if I had told it to anyone in the whole world, I would soonest tell it to your pale face." Deirdre's beauty "that brought the Sons of Usnach to their death" comes into many of the country songs. Grania of the yet earlier poems is not so well thought of. An old basket-maker said scornfully "Many would tell you she slept under the cromlechs but I don't believe that, and she a king's daughter. And I don't believe she was handsome, either. If she was, why would she have run away?" And another said "Finn had more wisdom than all the men of the world, but he wasn't wise enough to put a bar on Grania." I was told in many places of Osgar's bravery and Goll's strength and Conan's bitter tongue, and the arguments of Oisin and Patrick. And I have often been given the story of Oisin's journey to Tir-nan-Og, the Country of the Young, that is, as I am told, "a fine place and everything that is good is in it. And if anyone is sent there for a minute he will want to stop in it, and twenty years will seem to him like one half hour;" and "they say Tir-nan-Og is there yet, and so it may be in any place." VI