farmer's daughter. 'What is on you, Nora?' he said. 'Nothing you
could take from me, Red Hanrahan.' 'If there is any sorrow on you it
is I myself should be well able to serve you,' he said then, 'for it
is I know the history of the Greeks, and I know well what sorrow is
and parting, and the hardship of the world. And if I am not able to
save you from trouble,' he said, 'there is many a one I have saved
from it with the power that is in my songs, as it was in the songs of
the poets that were before me from the beginning of the world. And it
is with the rest of the poets I myself will be sitting and talking in
some far place beyond the world, to the end of life and time,' he
said. The girl stopped her crying, and she said, 'Owen Hanrahan, I
often heard you have had sorrow and persecution, and that you know
all the troubles of the world since the time you refused your love to
the queen-woman in Slieve Echtge; and that she never left you in
quiet since. But when it is people of this earth that have harmed
you, it is yourself knows well the way to put harm on them again. And
will you do now what I ask you, Owen Hanrahan?' she said. 'I will do
that indeed,' said he.

'It is my father and my mother and my brothers,' she said, 'that are
marrying me to old Paddy Doe, because he has a farm of a hundred
acres under the mountain. And it is what you can do, Hanrahan,' she
said, 'put him into a rhyme the same way you put old Peter Kilmartin
in one the time you were young, that sorrow may be over him rising up
and lying down, that will put him thinking of Collooney churchyard
and not of marriage. And let you make no delay about it, for it is
for to-morrow they have the marriage settled, and I would sooner see
the sun rise on the day of my death than on that day.'

'I will put him into a song that will bring shame and sorrow over