Page:The Aran Islands, parts III and IV (Synge).djvu/22

 One evening, when he had been reading to me for two hours, I asked him if he was tired.

'Tired?' he said; 'sure you wouldn't ever be tired reading!'

A few years ago this predisposition for intellectual things would have made him sit with old people and learn their stories; but now boys like him turn to books and to papers in Irish that are sent them from Dublin.

In most of the stories we read, where the English and Irish are printed side by side, I see him looking across to the English in passages that are a little obscure, though he is indignant if I say that he knows English better than Irish. Probably he knows the local Irish better than English, and printed English better than printed Irish, as the latter has frequent dialectic forms he does not know.

A few days ago, when he was reading a folk-tale from Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire, something caught his eye in the translation.

'There's a mistake in the English,' he said, after a moment's hesitation; 'he's put "gold chair" instead of "golden chair.

I pointed out that we speak of gold watches and gold pins.

'And why wouldn't we?' he said; 'but "golden chair" would be much nicer.'

It is curious to see how his rudimentary