An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the faeries) at night, says, ‘Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she’d be at every hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn’t have any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before the famine.’ Another old man says he was only a child when he saw her, but he remembered that ‘the strongest man that was among us, one John Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee.’ This is perhaps the man the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes. There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old poem said, ‘the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of the wolves,’ but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of ancient speech. She says, ‘The sun and the moon never shone on anybody so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she had two little blushes on her cheeks.’ And an old wrinkled woman who lives close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says, ‘I often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches of curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw Mary Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that was in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely creature. I was at her wake too – she had seen too much of the world. She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that field beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal (the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk.’ This old woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of silver, for though I knew an old man – he is dead now – who thought she might know ‘the cure for all the evils in the world,’ that the Sidhe knew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour. But a man by the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says, ‘Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness. And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made about them will ever live long.’
Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, who can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or a husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says ‘God bless them’ when one’s eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was ‘taken,’ as the phrase is, ‘for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they not take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and, maybe there were some that did not say “God bless her.”’ An old man who lives by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, ‘for there are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern3 there beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland.’ She died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally, meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of things, than are our men of learning. She ‘had seen too much of the world’; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind, and say, ‘I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see her,’ or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool na mna Sidhe where women of faery have been seen, how Raftery could have admired Mary Hynes so much if he had been altogether blind? He said, ‘I think Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more, and to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight, and a certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them.’ Everybody, indeed, will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind but a poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already given, says, ‘His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are three things that are the gift of the Almighty – poetry and dancing and principles. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming down from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than a man with education you’d meet now, for they got it from God’; and a man at Coole says, ‘When he put his finger to one part of his head, everything would come to him as if it was written in a book’; and an old pensioner at Kiltartan says, ‘He was standing under a bush one time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now between this and Rahasine.’ There is a poem of his about a bush, which I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in this shape.
A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died, but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven from the roof of the house where he lay, and ‘that was the angels who were with him’; and all night long there was a great light in the hovel, ‘and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious songs.’ It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities to immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes and Raftery to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the magnificence and penury of dreams.
When I was in a northern town awhile ago I had a long talk with a man who had lived in a neighbouring country district when he was a boy. He told me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that had not been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come from the Sidhe, and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names of several beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty had never brought happiness to anybody. It was a thing, he said, to be proud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time, for they were more picturesque than my memory of them.
A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP
Away to the north of Ben Bulben and Cope’s mountain lives ‘a strong farmer,’ a knight of the sheep they would have called him in the Gaelic days. Proud of his descent from one of the most fighting clans of the Middle Ages, he is a man of force alike in his words and in his deeds. There is but one man that swears like him, and this man lives far away upon the mountain. ‘Father in heaven, what have I done to deserve this?’ he says when he has lost his pipe; and no man but he who lives on the mountain can rival his language on a fair day over a bargain. He is passionate and abrupt in his movements, and when angry tosses his white beard about with his left hand.
One day I was dining with him when the servant-maid announced a certain Mr. O’Donnell. A sudden silence fell upon the old man and upon his two daughters. At last the eldest daughter said somewhat severely to her father, ‘Go and ask him to come in and dine.’ The old man went out, and then came in looking greatly relieved, and said, ‘He says he will not dine with us.’ ‘Go out,’ said the daughter, ‘and ask him into the back parlour, and give him some whiskey.’ Her father, who had just finished his dinner, obeyed sullenly, and I heard the door of the back parlour – a little room where the daughters sat and sewed during the evening – shut to behind the men. The daughter then turned to me and said, ‘Mr.