By JOHN PURCELL.
All young lovers that are fond of sporting,
pay attention for a while,
I will sing you the praises of Puck Fair,
and I'm sure it will make you smile;
Where the lads and lassies coming gaily to Killorglin can be seen,
To view the Puck upon the stage, as our hero dressed in green.
_Chorus._
And hurra for the gallant Puck so gay,
For he is a splendid one
Wind and rain don't touch his tail,
For his hair is thirty inches long.
Now it is on the square he's erected with all colours grand and gay;
There's not a fair throughout Ireland, but Puck Fair it takes the sway,
Where you see the gamblers in rotation, trick--o'-the-loop and
other games,
The ballad-singers and the wheel-of-fortune and the shooting-gallery
for to take aim.
_Chorus._
Where is the tyrant dare oppose it?
Our old customs we will hold up still,
And I think we will have another--
That is, Home Rule and Purchase Bill.
Now, all young men that are not married,
next Shrove can take a wife,
For before next Puck Fair we will have Home Rule,
and then you will be settled down in life.
Now the same advice I give young girls for to get married and have pluck.
Let the landlords see that you defy them when coming to Fair of Puck.
Cead Mile Failte to the Fair of Puck.
When one makes the obvious elisions, the lines are not so irregular
as they look, and are always sung to a measure: yet the whole, in
spite of the assonance, rhymes, and the 'colours grand and gay,'
seems pitifully remote from any good spirit of ballad-making.
Across the square a man and a woman, who had a baby tied on her
back, were singing another ballad on the Russian and Japanese War,
in the curious method of antiphony that is still sometimes heard in
the back streets of Dublin. These are some of the verses:
_Man._
Now provisions are rising, 'tis sad for to state,
The flour, tea and sugar, tobacco and meat;
But, God help us I poor Irish, how must we stand the test
_Ambo._
If they only now stop the trade of commerce.
_Woman._
Now the Russians are powerful on sea and on land;
But the Japs they are active, they will them command,
Before this war is finished I have one word to say,
_Ambo._
There will be more shot and drowned than in the Crimea.
_Man._
Now the Japs are victorious up to this time,
And thousands of Russians I hear they are dying.
Etc., etc.
And so it went on with the same alternation of the voices through
seven or eight verses; and it was curious to feel how much was
gained by this simple variation of the voices.
When I passed back to the fair-green, I met the men I am staying
with, and went off with them under an archway, and into a back yard
to look at a little two-year-old filly that they had bought and left
for the moment in a loose box with three or four young horses. She
was prettily and daintily shaped, but looked too light, I thought,
for the work she will be expected to do. As we came out again into
the road, an old man was singing an out-spoken ballad on women in
the middle of the usual crowd. Just as we passed it came to a
scandalous conclusion; and the women scattered in every direction,
shrieking with laughter and holding shawls over their mouths.
At the corner we turned into a public-house, where there were men we
knew, who had done their business also; and we went into the little
alcove to sit down quietly for a moment. 'What will you take, sir,'
said the man I lodge with, 'a glass of wine?'
I took beer and the others took porter; but we were only served
after some little time, as the house was thronged with people.
The men were too much taken up with their bargains and losses to
talk much of other matters; and before long we came out again, and
the son of the house started homewards, leading the new filly by a
little halter of rope.
Not long afterwards I started also. Outside Killorglin rain was
coming up over the hills of Glen Car, so that there was a strained
hush in the air, and a rich, aromatic smell coming from the bog
myrtle, or boggy shrub, that grows thickly in this place. The
strings of horses and jennets scattered over the road did not keep
away a strange feeling of loneliness that seems to hang over this
brown plain of bog that stretches from Carrantuohull to Cuchulain's
House.
Before I reached the cottage dense torrents of rain were closing
down through the glens, and driving in white sheets between the
little hills that are on each side of the way.
One morning in autumn I started in a local train for the first stage
of my journey to Dublin, seeing the last of Macgillicuddy's Reeks,
that were touched with snow in places, Dingle Bay and the islands
beyond it. At a little station where I changed trains, I got into a
carriage where there was a woman with her daughter, a girl of about
twenty, who seemed uneasy and distressed. Soon afterwards, when a
collector was looking at our tickets, I called out that mine was for
Dublin, and as soon as he got out the woman came over to me.
'Are you going to Dublin?' she said.