A MEMORY

We used to say that Stevenson should have known him to give him immortality in a book. He was a true Stevenson character. Indeed, in a manner of speaking he was a brother of Stevenson.

Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck.

The sestet might have been written of him down to the

. something of the Shorter Catechist,

for he was oddly, sincerely pious, and one never could be sure of the moment when he might not read you a sudden homily, although his wildness drove a coach and four through the conventional laws. Wild-he was wild; as wild as the wind that comes over the mountains, and, like that, sparkling and full of refreshment. He had the wild, dark eye of an Arab horse, an eye that in houses and amid towns meditated flight. You had a note of warning when, suddenly furtive, his eye was turned on you that at any moment he might be off like the wind.

He loved the wild ones of the world like himself. I really think in his heart of hearts he had rather be a jolly tramp than the brilliant and successful lawyer Fate forced him to be. Yes, Fate forced her gifts on him; made him successful; more, made him hard-working, gave him the instant audience his soul loved, gave him a season or two of success rapid beyond men's experience -the excitement, the applause, the laughter which wore out his eager heart.

I believe if he had lived in the eighteenth century he would have chosen to be a highwayman-one like his favourite hero, 'Bold Brennan on the Moor,' who was also an outlaw for his country's sake and robbed the rich to give to the poor. I can hear him now coming home at night trolling a verse of the ballad by which Brennan is enshrined for ever in the hearts of the country people. It was a common thing for him to come home in the small hours. Everyone loved him and would fain hold him of their company, and he was not one to break away from friendly detaining hands. The night might be wild and wet, cold and snowing, as

it might be balmy and set with stars. To him all weather came alike. He was initiate with the things of Nature, and the wind and the rain were his brothers. You would hear him a long way off trolling his song. It might be 'The White Cockade,' as it often was:

King Charles is King James's son,

And from a royal race is sprung.

Then up with the shout and out with the blade,
And viva la! the White Cockade.

Or it might be 'Brennan on the Moor':

'Tis of a gallant highwayman
A story I will tell.

His name was Billy Brennan,
In Ireland he did dwell.
All on the Kilworth mountain
He runned his wild career.
And many a goodly gentleman
Before him shook with fear.

Chorus:

Brennan on the Moor, boys,
Brennan on the Moor.
Bold and undaunted stood

Young Brennan on the Moor.

One day, as Billy Brennan

From the mountains came down,
He met the Mayor of Limerick
One mile outside the town.
The Mayor, he knew his features.
'Young man, I think,' says he,
'Your name is Willie Brennan:

You must come along with me.'

Now Brennan's wife had gone to town
Provisions for to buy,

And as she saw her Willie dear

She began to wail and cry.
'Give me,' says he, 'that tenpenny.'
And as the words he spoke

She handed him a blunderbuss

From underneath her cloak.

Now Brennan with that blunderbuss

A tale he did unfold.

He made the Mayor of Limerick
To yield him up his gold.
Five hundred pounds in silver
He took from off him there,
And with his horse and saddle
To the mountains did repair.

And so on in the interminable rhymed history of him who like Robin Hood:

A brace of loaded pistols

He carried night and day.
He never robbed a poor man
Upon the King's highway.
But what he took from off the rich,
Like Turpin and Black Bess,
He did divide it to assist

Poor widows in distress.

Or it might be a 'Come-all-ye,' describing the latest execution, sung in the fairs and sold as a broadsheet by the ballad-singers. He would come in possibly-nay, rather oftener than notsoaked through in that land of mild, perpetual rain, but at peace with the elements and all the world. And seeing his dear face you forgave him straightway the dinner that waited in vain, the long evening of expectation with the blank of his absence like a sore at the heart of it, the late hour, the broken slumber. Always he was worth waiting for, even into the small hours. He might have set your orderly life all askew. But here he was at last, loving and giving, carrying very often material gifts, always bubbling over with jests and stories, ready to sit down and unpack the budget of delightful things, although he was wet through and you were in a dressing-gown and conscious of the extinguished fire. He would button-hole you to your bedroom door with the stories which were to colour your dreams with the gold of laughter. And of course everything was forgiven. You had but to lay eyes on him to forgive him.

His humour was usually humane. Occasionally it was impish, elfish, a marsh-fire which those it played over forgot as soon as it had fled elsewhere. At its most mischievous it left no scar. You laughed with him when he was merry at your expense. There was never the rancour behind the jibes that desired to push the point home. There was something impersonal, aloof, in his quips and cranks. Among the most touchy people in the world he was a chartered mocker.

I have said he was wild, wild as the west wind that's mild and kind. Little hands one did not see plucked at him, little voices one did not hear, voices of the winds and the waters were incessantly calling him out from civilisation to leave the dull world behind and come out and be free.

Once it was a brook singing over its golden bed, brown as

amber, yellow gold in its high lights. We leant over a bridge on the country road looking down into its depths. He glanced back at the mountains from which it came, and there was an ache of longing in his voice.

'I never saw a little stream yet,' he said, 'that I didn't want to track it to its source. It'll have bubbled up maybe between the fronds of a hart's tongue fern and made a little pool. And then maybe it slipped over a rock and fell in a golden fringe. Do you remember the streams at Killarney falling over the rocks that edge the roads? And after that it'll have made a channel for itself, and gone singing down the dark glens and foaming about the boulders. It's a trout stream. If you watched long enough up there you'd see the fin of a trout where he was skulking in the pools. I wonder at all how the first trout came in it.'

Then he was moved to tell me the story of the Molaga trout. He was full of folk-lore, and ever ready to impart it. His knowledge made the very stones live.

'Did you ever hear of St. Molaga? It was he brought the honey-bees into Ireland. There is a well he blessed in the County Cork. There was a little silver trout used to swim round and round in it, and he too was blessed and was called St. Molaga's trout. The water possessed the power of healing, but it was unlawful to use it for any culinary purpose, and it couldn't be got to boil. To this day they say in the County Cork if a kettle is long a-boiling: "It must have St. Molaga's trout in it."

I got him to write a delicious piece of folk-lore, 'The Trencherman and the Molaga Trout,' which appeared in the Speaker. It was to have been the first of many. He was in love with the idea of making a book of these stories, racy and delightfully humorous and simple, gathered from the lips of the old peasants with whom he found it so easy to make friends.

'I'd like it to appear in America,' he said. 'I'd love to think of the old people reading it that emigrated out there.'

But the book never got further than the second story, which also appeared in the Speaker, I think. He was no great one for making books. He needed the instant audience of the eyes and the lips and the throats that looked and smiled and roared their applause at him.

That day at the brookside he turned away as one who shoulders his burden again regretfully. 'I ought to have been at the Four Courts half an hour ago,' he said; 'I've a big case to make up.'

It was the case that made his reputation, that set him on that brilliant way of easy yet strenuous effort which combined with the excitement and the applause he loved, to break his heart.

Another time we met with a stalwart gipsy man, a 'tinker,' as they call them in Ireland, a big, bullet-headed fellow with a great shock of grizzled curls and a face burnt almost black by the sun. There was some suggestion of the Wine-God in his looks, the Wine-God disguised for amorous adventures perhaps. We trudged the length of a long mountain road with him. The tinker' was sprung of a line of famous pipers: his father had won the All-Ireland prize at the Feis. For all his pagan looks the fellow was a Christian gipsy and would receive Christian burial when he died, although the house was not built that could harbour him for long, nor the roof-tree that he would not feel an intolerable oppression between him and the sky.

They talked of many things and I listened. The tinker's forbears had fought in the Rebellion of '98, on the right side, be sure. Wasn't his grandfather killed at Oulart Hollow? He talked of 'the troubles,' looking from side to side in the twilight as though the troubles' were not over and done with long ago, as though the bronze hedgerow might yet conceal a lurking spy or an armed yeoman. He was going over the mountains to Bray, walking. Some time in the early morning he would be there. He had my companion's last half-crown-this was before the great case brought the briefs raining upon him-and as he shambled off with his long trotting gait up the mountain side, a long, long look of sore desire for the freedom of the night and the hills followed him.

'He'll find a cave in the hills to-night,' said the longing voice, 'and he'll fill it with dead leaves for a bed. The stars and the moon 'll be looking in at him.'

After we had gone a little way the subject recurred.

'Did you notice,' he asked, 'the great walk of him from the hips? And did you see how his brogues were slit down to give his foot freedom in walking? It would be grand to be out with him on the hillside to-night listening to his stories and songs. A grand life for a man surely.'

Those were golden days and golden walks long ago. One never knew how good they were while they lasted. Once as we went along he prodded at a tiny beetle with his stick.

'Look at him, now,' he said, 'he's putting out the two little