Page:West Irish folk-tales and romances - William Larminie.djvu/29

 Rh first came to know him. He, also, is a middle-aged man. He knows many Ossianic poems by heart, which, he told me, his father taught him, verse by verse.

Glencolumkill is the extreme south-west corner of Donegal, remote, like Achill and Renvyle. It is chiefly represented by the tales of Pat. Minahan, from whom I obtained more stories than from any other one man. He said he was eighty years of age; but he was in full possession of all his faculties. He also had a holding on which he still worked industriously. He had no children; but his nephew, who lived with him, made up for all deficiencies of that nature. His style, with its short, abrupt sentences, is always remarkable, and at its best I think excellent. Jack Gillespie, known as Jack-Anne—the latter his mother's name—to distinguish him from other Jack Gillespies, was a man of sixty or over, also a cottier.

The tales were written down in places sufficiently varied;—from the Renvyle library to the neat little farmhouse parlour at Malinmore, where I spent so many a winter's evening, solitary but for the occasional visits of some one or other of my story-tellers;—from little smoky cabins, with inquisitive hens hopping on the table, to the unroofed freedom of rock or brae, under summer skies, by those thrice-lovely shores of Renvyle; by the scarcely less beautiful, though Rh