will speake of mine owne experience concerning this subject. I have
lived in three kinds of condition since I came out of my infancie.
The first time, which continued well nigh twentie yeares, I have
past it over as one who had no other means but casual without any
certaine maintenance or regular prescription. My expenses were so
much the more carelessly laid out and lavishly employed, by how much
more they wholly depended on fortunes rashnesse and exhibition. I
never lived so well at ease.... My second manner of life hath been to
have monie: which when I had once fingred, according to my condition
I sought to hoorde up some against a rainy day.... My minde was ever
on my halfe-penny; my thoughts ever that way. Of commoditie I had
little or nothing.... And after you are once accustomed, and have
fixed your thoughts upon a heape of monie, it is no longer at your
service; you dare not diminish it; it is a building which if you
touch or take any part from it, you will think it will all fall. And
I should sooner pawne my clothes or sell a horse, with lesse care
and compulsion than make a breach into that beloved purse which I
kept in store.... I was some yeares of the same humour: I wot not
what good Demon did most profitably remove me from it, like to the
Siracusan, and made me to neglect my sparing.... I live from hand to
mouth, from day to day, and have I but to supplie my present and
ordinarie needs I am satisfied.... And I singularly gratifie myself
this correction came upon me in an age naturally inclined to
covetousnesse, and that I am free from that folly so common and
peculiar to old men, and the most ridiculous of all humane follies.
Feraulez who had passed through both fortunes and found that
encrease of goods was no encrease of appetite to eat, to sleepe or
to embrace his wife; and who on the other side felt heavily on his
shoulders the importunitie of ordering and directing his
Oeconomicall affairs as it doth on mine, determined with himselfe to
content a poore young man, his faithfull friend, greedily gaping
after riches, and frankly made him a present donation of all his
great and excessive riches, always provided hee should undertake to
entertaine and find him, honestly and in good sort, as his guest and
friend. In which estate they lived afterwards most happily and
mutually content with the change of their condition."
And so I hope it may come to pass with the remaining years of Simon
and of Damer.
McDONOUGH'S WIFE
In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or,
as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that
lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for
the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to sit on chairs
placed on a corn-bin to make music for the dance. One of them was
always McDonough. He was the best of all the wandering pipers who
went about from house to house. When, at my marriage, I moved from
the barony of Dunkellin to the neighbouring barony of Kiltartan, he
came and played at the dance given to the tenants in my honour, and
he came and played also at my son's coming of age. Not long after
that he died. The last time I saw him he came to ask for a loan of
money to take the train to Ennis, where there was some fair or
gathering of people going on, and I would not lend to so old a friend,
but gave him a half-sovereign, and we parted with kindly words. He
was so great a piper that in the few years since his death myths
have already begun to gather around him. I have been told that his
father was taken into a hill of the Danes, the Tuatha de Danaan, the
ancient invisible race, and they had taught him all their tunes and
so bewitched his pipes that they would play of themselves if he
threw them up on the rafters. McDonough's pipes, they say, had not
that gift, but he himself could play those inspired tunes. Lately I
was told the story I have used in this play about his taking away
fifty sovereigns from the shearing at Cregroostha and spending them
at a village near. "I said to him," said the old man who told me this,
"that it would be better for him to have bought a good kitchen of
bacon; but he said, 'Ah, when I want more, I have but to squeeze the
pipes.'" The story of his wife's death and burial as I give it has
been told to me here and there. That is my fable, and the emotion
disclosed by the story is, I think, the lasting pride of the artist
of all ages:
"We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams....
We in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth."
I wrote the little play while crossing the Atlantic in the _Cymric_
last September. Since it was written I have been told at Kinvara
that "McDonough was a proud man; he never would go to a wedding
unasked, and he never would play through a town," So he had laid
down pride for pride's sake, at that time of the burying of his wife.
In Galway this summer one who was with him at the end told me he had
a happy death, "But he died poor; for what he would make in the long
nights he would spend through the summer days." And then she said,
"Himself and Reilly and three other fine pipers died within that year.
There was surely a feast of music going on in some other place."
_Dates of production of plays_.
THE BOGIE MEN was first produced at the Court Theatre, London, July 8,
1912, with the following cast:
_Taig O'Harragha_ J. M. KERRIGAN
_Darby Melody_ J. A. O'ROURKE
THE FULL MOON was first produced at the Abbey
Theatre, Dublin, on November 10, 1910, with the
following cast:
_Shawn Early_ J. O'ROURKE
_Bartley Fallon_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR
_Peter Tannian_ SIDNEY MORGAN
_Hyacinth Halvey_ FRED. O'DONOVAN
_Mrs. Broderick_ SARA ALLGOOD
_Miss Joyce_ EILEEN O'DOHERTY
_Cracked Mary_ MAIRE O'NEILL
_Davideen_ J. M. KERRIGAN
COATS was first produced at the Abbey Theatre,
Dublin, December, 1910, with the following cast:
_Mineog_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR
_Hazel_ J. M. KERRIGAN
_John_ J. A. O'ROURKE
DAMER'S GOLD was first produced at the Abbey
Theatre November 21, 1912, with the following cast:
_Delia Hessian_ SARA ALLGOOD
_Staffy Kirwan_ SIDNEY MORGAN
_Ralph Hessian_ J. M. KERRIGAN
_Damer_ ARTHUR SINCLAIR
_Simon Niland_ A. WRIGHT
McDONOUGH'S WIFE has not yet been produced by the Abbey Company.
End of Project Gutenberg's New Irish Comedies, by Lady Augusta Gregory