Page:Shiana - Peadar Ua Laoghaire.djvu/11



story "" appeared as an Irish book about eleven years ago, and has been read with so much interest that it has now been thought well to publish it in English also. On its first appearance in serial form it was accompanied by an English translation which was intended for the help and instruction of students, and therefore gave an almost literal rendering of the text. Such a translation could not fairly be taken as the English equivalent of Canon O'Leary's Irish work; nor would it be any more reasonable to represent the exquisite Irish of "" by the ugly, garbled English known as "the brogue." Irish speakers, in districts uncontaminated by English, such as that in which Canon O'Leary grew up and in which he listened to the stories told by "Peg," have a perfect mastery of their own language, and use it with all the correctness and refinement and grace and power which, in the case of English, we look for only among the well-educated. Even small children speak Irish correctly, such a thing as "baby-talk" being unknown, so that in Canon O'Leary's book there is no difference between the Irish spoken by the little girls to each other in their comments upon "" and the Irish of the story itself; the one is as good and as dignified a form of speech as the other. At the same time, a child's thought often appears in little Peg's descriptions of things of which she has