Blair Collection > Beside the fire

XXVIU PREFACE.
That would set in sound lasting sleep
The whole great world,
With the sweetness of the calming* tunes
That the champion would play."
The Irish run is as follows : —
" The kerne played music and tunes and instruments of song,
Wounded men and women with babes,
And slashed heroes and mangled warriors,
And all the wounded and all the sick,
And the bitterly-wounded of the great world,
They would sleep with the voice of the music,
Ever efficacious, ever sweet, which the kerne played."
Again, when the kerne approaches anyone, his gait
is thus described half-rythmically by the Scotch narra-
tor : — "A young chap was seen coming towards them,
his two shoulders through his old coat, his two ears
through his old hat, his two squat kickering tatter-y shoes
full of cold roadway-ish water, three feet of his sword
sideways in the side of his haunch after the scabbard
was ended."
The Irish writer makes him come thus : — " And he
beheld the slender grey kerne approaching him straight,
and half his sword bared behind his haunch, and old shoes
full of water sousing about him, and the top of his ears
out through his old mantle, and a short butt-burned
javelin of holly in his hand."
These few specimens, which could be largely multi-
* Campbell misunderstood this also, as he sometimes does when the word
is Irish. Sio^atdh means " lairy."