As soon as he had gone Charley leapt up out of bed and got on his
horse, and rode seven miles to where the first horse was waiting for
him. Then he rode that horse seven miles, and another horse seven
miles more, till he came to the racecourse.
He rode on the gentleman's horse and he won the race.
There were great crowds looking on, and when they saw him coming in
they said it was Charley Lambert, or the devil was in it, for there
was no one else could bring in a horse the way he did, for the leg
was after being knocked off of the horse and he came in all the
same.
When the race was over, he got up on the horse was waiting for him,
and away with him for seven miles. Then he rode the other horse
seven miles, and his own horse seven miles, and when he got home he
threw off his clothes and lay down on his bed.
After a while the doctor came back and said it was a great race they
were after having.
The next day the people were saying it was Charley Lambert was the
man who rode the horse. An inquiry was held, and the doctor swore
that Charley was ill in his bed, and he had seen him before the race
and after it, so the gentleman saved his fortune.
After that he told me another story of the same sort about a fairy
rider, who met a gentleman that was after losing all his fortune but
a shilling, and begged the shilling of him. The gentleman gave him
the shilling, and the fairy rider - a little red man - rode a horse
for him in a race, waving a red handkerchief to him as a signal when
he was to double the stakes, and made him a rich man.
Then he gave us an extraordinary English doggerel rhyme which I took
down, though it seems singularly incoherent when written out at
length. These rhymes are repeated by the old men as a sort of chant,
and when a line comes that is more than usually irregular they seem
to take a real delight in forcing it into the mould of the
recitative. All the time he was chanting the old man kept up a kind
of snakelike movement in his body, which seemed to fit the chant and
make it part of him.
THE WHITE HORSE
My horse he is white,
Though at first he was bay,
And he took great delight
In travelling by night
And by day.
His travels were great
If I could but half of them tell,
He was rode in the garden by Adam,
The day that he fell.
On Babylon plains
He ran with speed for the plate,
He was hunted next day
By Hannibal the great.
After that he was hunted
In the chase of a fox,
When Nebuchadnezzar ate grass,
In the shape of an ox.
We are told in the next verses of his going into the ark with Noah,
of Moses riding him through the Red Sea; then
He was with king Pharaoh in Egypt
When fortune did smile,
And he rode him stately along
The gay banks of the Nile.
He was with king Saul and all
His troubles went through,
He was with king David the day
That Goliath he slew.
For a few verses he is with Juda and Maccabeus the great, with
Cyrus, and back again to Babylon. Next we find him as the horse that
came into Troy.
When ( ) came to Troy with joy,
My horse he was found,
He crossed over the walls and entered
The city I'm told.
I come on him again, in Spain,
And he in full bloom,
By Hannibal the great he was rode,
And he crossing the Alps into Rome.
The horse being tall
And the Alps very high,
His rider did fall
And Hannibal the great lost an eye.
Afterwards he carries young Sipho (Scipio), and then he is ridden by
Brian when driving the Danes from Ireland, and by St. Ruth when he
fell at the battle of Aughrim, and by Sarsfield at the siege of
Limerick.
He was with king James who sailed
To the Irish shore,
But at last he got lame,
When the Boyne's bloody battle was o'er.
He was rode by the greatest of men
At famed Waterloo,
Brave Daniel O'Connell he sat
On his back it is true.
* * * * * * *
Brave Dan's on his back,
He's ready once more for the field.
He never will stop till the Tories,
He'll make them to yield.
Grotesque as this long rhyme appears, it has, as I said, a sort of
existence when it is crooned by the old man at his fireside, and it
has great fame in the island. The old man himself is hoping that I
will print it, for it would not be fair, he says, that it should die
out of the world, and he is the only man here who knows it, and none
of them have ever heard it on the mainland. He has a couple more
examples of the same kind of doggerel, but I have not taken them
down.
Both in English and in Irish the songs are full of words the people
do not understand themselves, and when they come to say the words
slowly their memory is usually uncertain.
All the morning I have been digging maidenhair ferns with a boy I
met on the rocks, who was in great sorrow because his father died
suddenly a week ago of a pain in his heart.
