Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to
get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a
part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars
as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might
turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible. But my
asking, timid with the fear of mockery, was unheeded. Yet I missed
but by a little an opportunity that might have made me a real Irish
scholar, and not as I am, imperfect, stumbling. For a kinsman learned
in the language, the translator of the wonderful _Silva Gaedelica_
had been sometimes a guest in the house, and would still have been
welcomed there but that my mother, who had a great dislike to the marriage
of cousins had fancied he was taking a liking to one of my elder sisters;
and with that suspicion the "winged nymph, Opportunity" had passed
from my reach. After my marriage I bought a grammar and worked at it
for a while with the help of a gardener. But it was difficult and my
teacher was languid, suspecting it may be some hidden mockery, for
those were the days before Irish became the fashion. It was not till
a dozen or more years later, and after my husband's death, that my
son, having won the classical entrance scholarship at Harrow, took
a fancy to learn a nearer language, and rode over to Tillyra before
breakfast one morning to ask our neighbour Edward Martyn to help him
to a teacher. He came back without what he had sought, but with the
gift of a fine old Irish Bible, which became a help in our early lessons.
For we set to work together, and I found the task a light one in comparison
with those first attempts. For that young priest, Father Eugene O'Growney,
sent from Ireland to look for health in California, had used the short
space of life left to him in writing simple lessons in Irish grammar,
that made at least the first steps easy. And another thing had happened.
Dr. Douglas Hyde, _An Craoibhin,_ had founded the Gaelic League,
and through it country people were gathered together in the Irish
speaking places to give the songs and poems, old and new, kept in their
memory. This discovery, this disclosure of the folk learning, the folk
poetry, the ancient tradition, was the small beginning of a weighty
change. It was an upsetting of the table of values, an astonishing
excitement. The imagination of Ireland had found a new homing place.