'There's a fierce wolf at Carrig O'Neill; There is blood on his tongue and blood on his mouth.
'I saw them, and I heard the cries Of kites and of black crows.
'Ochone! Is not the only Son of God angry; Ochone! The red blood that was poured out yesterday!'
I do not know who the following poem was written about, or if it is about anyone in particular; but one line of it puts into words the emotion of many an Irish 'felon.' 'It is with the people I was; it is not with the law I was.' For the Irish crime, treason-felony, is only looked on as a crime in the eyes of the law, not in the eyes of the people:--
'I am lying in prison, I am in bonds; To-morrow I will be hanged, Who am to-night so quiet, So quiet; Who am to-night so quiet.
'I am in prison, My heart is cold and heavy; To-morrow I will be hanged, And there is no help for me, My grief; Och! there is no help for me.
'I am in prison, And I did no wrong; I only did the work Was just, was right, was good, I did, Oh, I did the thing was good.
'It is with the people I was, It is not with the law I was; But they took me in my sleep, On the side of Cnoc-na-Feigh; And so To-morrow they will hang me.'
'I am weak in my body, I am vexed in my heart, And to-morrow I will be hanged; Lying beneath the clay, My sorrow, Lying beneath the clay.
'May God give pardon To my vexed, sorrowful soul; May God give mercy To me now and forever, Amen! To me now and forever.'
But translation is poor work. Even if it gives a glimpse of the heart of a poem, too much is lost in losing the outward likeness. Here are the last lines of the lament of a felon's brother:--
'Now that you are stretched in the cold grave May God set you free: It's vexed and sorry and pitiful are my thoughts; It's sorrowful I am to-day!'
I look at them and read them; and wonder why when I first read them, their sound had hung about me for days like a sobbing wind; but when I look at them in their own form, the sob is in them still:
Nois ann san uaigh fhuair ó tá tu sínte Go saoraigh Dia thu Is buaidhcartha, brónach bocht atá mo smaointe Is bronach mé andhiú.
Yesterday I asked a woman on the Echtge hills, if any of her neighbours had gone to the war. She said: 'No; but I know a great many that went to America when the war began--even boys that had business to do at home; they were afraid of being brought away by the Press.' On another part of the Echtge hills, where a rumour had come that the police were to be sent to the war, an old woman said to a policeman I know: 'When you go out there, don't be killing the people of my religion.' He said: 'The Boers are not of your religion'; but she said: 'They are; I know they must be Catholics, or the English would not be against them.' Others on that wild range think that this is the beginning of the great war that will end in the final rout of the enemies of Ireland. Old prophecies say this war is to come at the meeting of these centuries; and there is an old Irish verse which seems to allude to this, and which has been thus translated:--