The danger of his life
on the sea gives him the alertness of the primitive hunter, and the
long nights he spends fishing in his curagh bring him some of the
emotions that are thought peculiar to men who have lived with the
arts.
As Michael is busy in the daytime, I have got a boy to come up and
read Irish to me every afternoon. He is about fifteen, and is
singularly intelligent, with a real sympathy for the language and
the stories we read.
One evening when he had been reading to me for two hours, I asked
him if he was tired.
'Tired?' he said, 'sure you wouldn't ever be tired reading!'
A few years ago this predisposition for intellectual things would
have made him sit with old people and learn their stories, but now
boys like him turn to books and to papers in Irish that are sent
them from Dublin.
In most of the stories we read, where the English and Irish are
printed side by side, I see him looking across to the English in
passages that are a little obscure, though he is indignant if I say
that he knows English better than Irish. Probably he knows the local
Irish better than English, and printed English better than printed
Irish, as the latter has frequent dialectic forms he does not know.
A few days ago when he was reading a folk-tale from Douglas Hyde's
Beside the Fire, something caught his eye in the translation.
'There's a mistake in the English,' he said, after a moment's
hesitation, 'he's put "gold chair" instead of "golden chair."'
I pointed out that we speak of gold watches and gold pins.
'And why wouldn't we?' he said; 'but "golden chair" would be much
nicer.'
It is curious to see how his rudimentary culture has given him the
beginning of a critical spirit that occupies itself with the form of
language as well as with ideas.
One day I alluded to my trick of joining string.
'You can't join a string, don't be saying it,' he said; 'I don't
know what way you're after fooling us, but you didn't join that
string, not a bit of you.'
Another day when he was with me the fire burned low and I held up a
newspaper before it to make a draught. It did not answer very well,
and though the boy said nothing I saw he thought me a fool.
The next day he ran up in great excitement.
'I'm after trying the paper over the fire,' he said, 'and it burned
grand.
