No mourners come, as ’tis believed the sight
Of any death or sickness now begets the same.
And as these lines come to my mind now, to illustrate what I am saying, I may as well give the whole of the lines I wrote on the burial of Jillen Andy, for this is the year she died—the year 1847 that I am writing about. I dug the grave for her; she was buried without a coffin, and I straightened out her head on a stone, around which Jack McCart, the tailor, of Beulnaglochdubh had rolled his white-spotted red handkerchief.
Andy Hayes had been a workman for my father. He died—leaving four sons—John, Charley, Tead and Andy. The mother was known as Jillen Andy. The eldest son, John, enlisted and was killed in India; Charley got a fairy-puck in one of his legs, and the leg was cut off by Dr. Donovan and Dr. Fitzgibbons; Andy also enlisted, and died in the English service, Tead was a simpleton or “innocent”—no harm in him, and every one kind to him. I was at play in the street one day, my mother was sitting on the door step, Tead came up to her and told her his mother was dead, and asked if she would let me go with him to dig the grave for her. My mother told me to go with him, and I went. Every incident noted in the verses I am going to print, came under my experience that day. I wrote these verses twenty years after, in the convict prison of Chatham, England, thinking of old times. That you may understand some of the lines, I may tell you some of the stories of our people. There were fairies in Ireland in my time; England is rooting them out, too. They were called “the good people,” and it was not safe to say anything bad of them. The places where fairies used to resort were called “eerie” places, and if you whistled at night you would attract them to you, particularly if you whistled while you were in bed. Then, when a person is to be buried, you must not make a prisoner of him or of her in the grave; you must take out every pin, and unloose every string before you put it into the coffin, so that it may be free to come from the other world to see you. And at the “waking” of a friend, it is not at all good to shed tears over the corpse, and let the tears fall on the clothes, because every such tear burns a burned hole in the body of the dead person in the other world.
JILLEN ANDY.
“Come to the graveyard if you’re not afraid;
I’m going to dig my mother’s grave; she’s dead,
And I want some one that will bring the spade,
For Andy’s out of home, and Charlie’s sick in bed.”