I had been often told, by supporters of either side, that there was one contest between the two, at which Callinan ’made Raftery cry tears down;’ and I wondered how it was that his wit had so far betrayed him.  It has been explained to me lately.  Raftery had made a long poem, ’The Hunt,’ in which he puts ‘a Writer’ in the place of the fox, and calls on all the gentlemen of Galway and Mayo, and even on ’Sarsfield from Limerick,’ to come and hunt him through their respective neighbourhoods with a pack of hounds.  It contains many verses; and he seems to have improvised others in the different places where he sang it.  In the written copy I have seen, Burke is the ‘Writer’ who is thus hunted.  But he probably put in the name of any other rival from time to time.  This is the story:  ’He and the Callinans were sometimes vexed with one another, but they’d make friends after; but there was one day he was put down by them.  There was a funeral going on at Killeenan, and Raftery was there; and he was asked into the corpse-house afterwards, and the people asked him for the song about Callinan, and he began hunting him all through the country, and the people were laughing and making him go on; but Callinan’s brother had come in, and was listening to him, and Raftery didn’t see him, being blind; and he brought him to Killeenan at last, and he said:  “Where can the rogue go now, unless he’ll swim the turlough?” And at that Callinan’s brother stood up and said, “Who is it you are calling a rogue?” And Raftery tried to laugh it off, and he said, “You mustn’t expect poetry and truth to go together.”  But Callinan said:  “I’ll give you poetry that’s truth as well;” and he began to say off some verses his brother had made on Raftery; and Raftery was choked up that time, and hadn’t a word.’  This story is corroborated by an eye-witness who said to me:  ’It was in this house he was on the night Callinan made him cry.  My father was away at the time; if he had been there, he never would have let Callinan come into the house unknown to Raftery.’  I have not heard all of Callinan’s poem, but this is part of it:—­

’He left the County Mayo; he was hunted up from the country of the brothons’ (thick bed-coverings, then made in Mayo) ’without any for the night, nor any shift for bedding, but with an old yellow blanket with a thousand patches; he had a black trouser down to the ground with two hundred holes and forty pieces; he had long legs like the shank of a pipe, and a long great coat, for it is many the dab he put in his pocket.  His coat was greasy, and it was no wonder, and an old grey hat as grey as snuff as it was many the day it was in the dunghill.’

It is said that ’Raftery could have answered that song better, but he had no back here; and Callinan was well-to-do, and had so many of his family and so many friends.’  But others say there were some allusions in it to the poverty of his home, that had become known through a servant girl from Raftery’s birth-place.  But I think even Callinan’s friends are sorry now that Raftery was ever made to ‘cry tears down.’