have a little place for himself, where he could go in and out as he
liked, and put his head in his hands through the length of an evening
if the fret was on him, and loneliness after the old times. One by
one the neighbours began to send their children in to get some
learning from him, and with what they brought, a few eggs or an oaten
cake or a couple of sods of turf, he made out a way of living. And if
he went for a wild day and night now and again to the Burrough, no
one would say a word, knowing him to be a poet, with wandering in his
heart.

It was from the Burrough he was coming that May morning, light-
hearted enough, and singing some new song that had come to him. But
it was not long till a hare ran across his path, and made away into
the fields, through the loose stones of the wall. And he knew it was
no good sign a hare to have crossed his path, and he remembered the
hare that had led him away to Slieve Echtge the time Mary Lavelle was
waiting for him, and how he had never known content for any length of
time since then. 'And it is likely enough they are putting some bad
thing before me now,' he said.

And after he said that he heard the sound of crying in the field
beside him, and he looked over the wall. And there he saw a young
girl sitting under a bush of white hawthorn, and crying as if her
heart would break. Her face was hidden in her hands, but her soft
hair and her white neck and the young look of her, put him in mind of
Bridget Purcell and Margaret Gillane and Maeve Connelan and Oona
Curry and Celia Driscoll, and the rest of the girls he had made songs
for and had coaxed the heart from with his flattering tongue.

She looked up, and he saw her to be a girl of the neighbours, a