The clump of willows is the Wood of the Many Sallows (a willow-tree
is familiarly known as a 'sally' in Ireland). Do you know Yeats's
song, put to a quaint old Irish air?
'Down by the sally gardens my love and I did meet,
She passed the sally gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree,
But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree.'
The summer-house is the Greenan; that is, grianan, a bright, sunny
place. On the arm of a tree in the Greenan hangs something you
might (if you are dull) mistake for a plaited garland of rushes hung
with pierced pennies; but it really is our Chain of Silence, a
useful article of bygone ages, which the lord of a mansion shook
when he wished an attentive hearing, and which deserved a better
fate and a longer survival than it has met. Jackeen's Irish terrier
is Bran,--though he does not closely resemble the great Finn's
sweet-voiced, gracefully-shaped, long-snouted hound; the coracle
lying on the shore of the little lough--the coracle made of skin,
like the old Irish boats--is the Wave-Sweeper; and the faithful mare
that we hire by the day is, by your leave, Enbarr of the Flowing
Mane. No warrior was ever killed on the back of this famous steed,
for she was as swift as the clear, cold wind of spring, travelling
with equal ease and speed on land and sea, an' may the divil fly
away wid me if that same's not true.
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