* * * * * * *
Brave Dan's on his back,
He's ready once more for the field.
He never will stop till the Tories,
He'll make them to yield.
Grotesque as this long rhyme appears, it has, as I said, a sort of
existence when it is crooned by the old man at his fireside, and it
has great fame in the island. The old man himself is hoping that I
will print it, for it would not be fair, he says, that it should die
out of the world, and he is the only man here who knows it, and none
of them have ever heard it on the mainland. He has a couple more
examples of the same kind of doggerel, but I have not taken them
down.
Both in English and in Irish the songs are full of words the people
do not understand themselves, and when they come to say the words
slowly their memory is usually uncertain.
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.
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