met them on the road.  At first we thought them distant relations coming to the wake, but when I saw only one woman among the set, and she mounted on a horse, I began to suspect that all wasn’t right.  I accordingly turned back a bit, and walked near enough without their seeing me to hear the discoorse, and discover the whole business.  In less than no time I was back at the wake-house, so I up and tould them what I saw, and off we set, about forty of us, with good cudgels, scythe-sneds, and flails, fully bent to bring her back from them, come or go what would.  And troth, sure enough, we did it; and I was the man myself, that rode afore the mother on the same horse that carried her off.

“From this out, when and wherever I got an opportunity, I whispered the soft nonsense, Nancy, into poor Mary’s ear, until I put my comedher* on her, and she couldn’t live at all without me.  But I was something for a woman to look at then, any how, standing six feet two in my stocking soles, which, you know, made them call me Shane Fadh.** At that time I had a dacent farm of fourteen acres in Crocknagooran—­the same that my son, Ned, has at the present time; and though, as to wealth, by no manner of manes fit to compare with the Finigans, yet, upon the whole, she might have made a worse match.  The father, however, wasn’t for me; but the mother was:  so after drinking a bottle or two with the mother, Sarah Traynor, her cousin, and Mary, along with Jack Donnellan, on my part, in their own barn, unknown to the father, we agreed to make, a runaway match of it, and appointed my uncle Brian Slevin’s as the house we’d go to.  The next Sunday was the day appointed; so I had my uncle’s family prepared, and sent two gallons of whiskey, to be there before us, knowing that neither the Finigans nor my own friends liked stinginess.

* Comedher—­come hither—­alluding to the burden of an old love-charm which is still used by the young of both sexes on May-morning.  It is a literal translation of the Irish word “gutsho.”

     ** Fadh is tall, or long

“Well, well, after all, the world is a strange thing—­it’s myself hardly knows what to make of it.  It’s I that did doat night and day upon that girl; and indeed there was them that could have seen me in Jimmaiky for her sake, for she was the beauty of the country, not to say of the parish, for a girl in her station.  For my part, I could neither ate nor sleep, for thinking that she was so soon to be my own married wife, and to live under my roof.  And when I’d think of it, how my heart would bounce to my throat, with downright joy and delight!  The mother had made us promise not to meet till Sunday, for fraid of the father becoming suspicious:  but if I was to be shot for it, I couldn’t hinder myself from going every night to the great flowering whitethorn that was behind their garden; and although she knew I hadn’t promised to come, yet there she still was; something, she said, tould her I would come.