They kept in talk all the way to the Burrough, and as for Mary
Gillis, when she saw him and heard who he was, she went near crying
to think of having a man with so great a name in the house.
Hanrahan was well pleased to settle down with them for a while, for
he was tired with wandering; and since the day he found the little
cabin fallen in, and Mary Lavelle gone from it, and the thatch
scattered, he had never asked to have any place of his own; and he
had never stopped long enough in any place to see the green leaves
come where he had seen the old leaves wither, or to see the wheat
harvested where he had seen it sown. It was a good change to him to
have shelter from the wet, and a fire in the evening time, and his
share of food put on the table without the asking.
He made a good many of his songs while he was living there, so well
cared for and so quiet, The most of them were love songs, but some
were songs of repentance, and some were songs about Ireland and her
griefs, under one name or another.
Every evening the bacachs and beggars and blind men and fiddlers
would gather into the house and listen to his songs and his poems,
and his stories about the old time of the Fianna, and they kept them
in their memories that were never spoiled with books; and so they
brought his name to every wake and wedding and pattern in the whole
of Connaught. He was never so well off or made so much of as he was
at that time.
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