Blair Collection > Beside the fire

xlvi PREFACE.
is prepared to sit up with him all night, for his mind is sure
to be so distraught with harvest operations that he can tell
you nothing. If it is winter time, however, and you fortu-
nately find him unoccupied, nevertheless it requires some
management to get him to tell his stories. Half a glass of
ishka-baha, a pipe of tobacco, and a story of one's own
are the best things to begin with. If, however, you
start to take down the story verbatim with pencil and
paper, as an unwary collector might do, you destroy all,
or your shanachie becomes irritable. He will not wait
for you to write down your sentence, and if you call out,
" Stop, stop, wait till I get this down," he will forget
what he was going to tell you, and you will not get a
third of his story, though you may think you have it all.
What you m.ust generally do is to sit quietly smoking
advise you — especially such of you as do not already know Irish — to leave all
this alone, or rather to be content with what you can easily find in a translated
shape in the columns of Hardiman, Miss Brooke, Mangan, and Sigerson." So
that the man whose most earnest aspiration in life is Ireland a nation, begins by
advising the youth of Ireland 7iot to study the language of their fathers, and to
read the gorgeous Gaelic poetry in such pitiful translations as Hardiman a.nd
Miss Brooke have given of a few pieces. The result of this teaching is as
might be expected. A well-known second-hand book seller in Dublin assured
me recently that as many as 200 Irish MSS. had passed through his hand
within the last few years. Dealers had purchased them throughout the
country in Cavan, Monaghan, and many other counties for a few pence, and
sold them to him, and he had dispersed them again to the four winds of heaven,
especially to America, Australia, and New Zealand. Many of these must have
contained matter not to be found elsewhere. All are now practically lost, and
nobody in Ireland either knows or cares. In America, however, of all coun-
tries in the world, they appreciate the situation better, and the fifth resolution
passed at the last great Chicago Congress was one about the Irish language.