The voice of her music Scully! thou false one You basely betrayed him; In his strong hour of need When thy right hand should aid him ; He fed thee;-he clad thee; You had all could delight thee; You left him ;-you sold him ;— May heaven requite thee!— Scully! may all kinds Of evil attend thee; On thy dark road of life May no kind one befriend thee; May fevers long burn thee; And agues long freeze thee; May the strong hand of God In his red anger sieze thee. Had he died calmly I would not deplore him, Or if the wild strife Of the sea-war closed o'er him; But with ropes round his white limbs Through ocean to trail him, Like a fish after slaughter!— "Tis therefore I wail him. Long may the curse Of his people pursue them,Scully that sold him, And soldier that slew him. Be their best bed for ever! In the hole which the vile hands Of soldiers had made thee. Unhonoured, unshrouded And headless they laid thee; No sigh to regret thee, No eye to rain o'er thee, No dirge to lament thee, No friend to deplore thee. Dear head of my darling These aged eyes see thee High spiked on their gaol; That cheek in the summer sun Ne'er shall grow warm, Nor that eye e'er catch light But the flash of the storm. A curse, blessed ocean, Is on thy green water, To Ivera of slaughter, Since thy billows were dyed With the red wounds of fear, Of Muiertach Oge, Our O'Sullivan Bear. THE FAIR KEEN ON EDMOND WALSH AND ARTHU LEARY. TRANSLATED FROM THE IRISH BY THE EDITOR. This Keen, or rather dialogue respecting the dead, was taken down from the recitation of Mrs. Leary, and the following traditionary particulars obtained from her, are necessary to explain the subject. About eighty years since, Edmond Walsh, a farmer, in the district of Kinalea, was hanged and beheaded at Cork, for the murder of Arthur Leary, his neighbour and gossip.* * Although gossip is a familiar English word from the Saxon Godsibbe, it may be necessary to explain its Irish and primitive meaning to the English reader, which is best done in the words of Verstegan :-"Our christian ancestors, understanding a spiritual affinity to grow between the parents, and such as undertooke for the child at baptisme, called each other by the name of Godsib, that is of kin together through God: and the child in like manner, called such his godfathers and godmothers." The spiritual affinity of Gossipred was considered to be among the strongest feudal ties, and is frequently alluded to by historians.—A common and solemn threat of vengeance still used in Ireland, is, “By the right hand of my gossip." (dar lamha mo Walsh was married to a respectable young woman, by whom he had two children, when he became enamoured of another woman, named Mary Fahey. She urged him to murder his wife in order that he might marry her. The infatuated man at length agreed to her proposal; but Mary Fahey, fearing that his better feeling might return and overcome his resolution, accompanied Walsh home that night, and held a candle while he sharpened a razor for the purpose of committing the murder. When Walsh and his paramour entered the room in which his wife and children slept, he stopped for a moment,―conscience struck at the act he was about to perpetrate. "Why don't you go on ?" asked his companion in guilt. Thus urged forward, Walsh advanced to the side of the bed. Again he hesitated, and beholding his children calmly sleeping by their mother's side, he turned away. 66 "What, what!" exclaimed the fiend in woman's shape. "Since have no heart (courage), Edmond, give me the razor out of your hand." you Stepping back from the bed, Walsh replied, "I have done my wife enough of wrong. Heaven will not let me murder her, guarded as she is by those two little angels at her side." And he rushed forth wildly from the house, followed by Mary Fahey, in an agony of rage and disappointment. A violent altercation ensued in consequence, at a gate near the high road, along which Walsh's neighbour and gossip, Arthur Leary, happened at the moment to pass. It was evident to Walsh that Leary must have overheard sufficient to criminate him; and acting upon the impulse of the moment, he wrenched a bar from chardais Criost, literally, by the hand planted through Christ in mine), which although now an empty expression, was formerly sufficient to implicate the fellow sponsors in the quarrel. As gossips therefore were bound to succour each other, the murder of one, was popularly regarded in the same light as that of a parent or blood-relation. the gate, and following Leary, struck the unoffending man a murderous blow on the back of the head, which felled him to the ground. Whilst Walsh held a consultation with his profligate companion as to the best mode of disposing of Leary's body, the parish priest came up, and Walsh, to prevent discovery, ran madly at him with the intention of murdering him also; but the priest, roused by the furious demeanour of Walsh, who brandished the murderous bar of the gate, stuck spurs into his horse, and plunging into the river Ownabuoy escaped by swimming across it. "Ah, you have escaped me," shouted Walsh in Irish. "God is good to you, to have inspired you to ride with blessed spurs. For the skin of my neck has been tanned to-night to make leather for the spurs of the devil;" which last remarkable sentence has since become an idiom in the district. The priest, to whom Walsh's person was well known, could only believe, from his extraordinary and furious conduct, coupled with this expression, that he had become suddenly deranged. And it was so reported on the following morning; a supposition which Walsh's excited and agitated appearance was well calculated to confirm. Arthur Leary having left his home with the intention of being absent two or three days, his disappearance caused no uneasiness for his safety to be felt until after the expiration of that time. But when at the end of a week he neither returned home, nor was heard of, and enquiry after him was made in vain at the place for which he had set out, serious apprehensions began to be entertained for his fate; and as the rivers had been much swollen by heavy rains, it was believed that he must have been drowned in attempting to pass some ford. As, however, the body had not been found, a rumour got abroad respecting the possibility of Leary having been murdered, for it was known that he had left home with the intention of making some purchases at a fair, and was therefore supposed to have had a sum of money about |