unsteady, along the edge of the strand, and the grey shapes were
flying here and there around him. And this is what they were saying,
'It is a pity for him that refuses the call of the daughters of the
Sidhe, for he will find no comfort in the love of the women of the
earth to the end of life and time, and the cold of the grave is in
his heart for ever. It is death he has chosen; let him die, let him
die, let him die.'




HANRAHAN AND CATHLEEN THE DAUGHTER OF HOOLIHAN.


It was travelling northward Hanrahan was one time, giving a hand to a
farmer now and again in the hurried time of the year, and telling his
stories and making his share of songs at wakes and at weddings.

He chanced one day to overtake on the road to Collooney one Margaret
Rooney, a woman he used to know in Munster when he was a young man.
She had no good name at that time, and it was the priest routed her
out of the place at last. He knew her by her walk and by the colour
of her eyes, and by a way she had of putting back the hair off her
face with her left hand. She had been wandering about, she said,
selling herrings and the like, and now she was going back to Sligo,
to the place in the Burrough where she was living with another woman,
Mary Gillis, who had much the same story as herself. She would be
well pleased, she said, if he would come and stop in the house with
them, and be singing his songs to the bacachs and blind men and
fiddlers of the Burrough. She remembered him well, she said, and had