Excerpt from Legends and PoemsI am an Irish peasant, born and reared in an Irish cabin. And educated in an Irish hedge-school. I have spent my years (and as yet, they are not many) among the lower classes of the insulted and despised Irish peasantry. On Sundays I have knelt with them before the same wide altar on the week days I have wrought with them in the same fields, and in the same employments: on the summer evenings I have joined with them in the gaieties of the rustic dance on the well-trodden village green, and during the long tempestuous winter evenings I have been with them at the gaming table, or the wake, or formed a link with them in the laughing circle around the cheerful cottage fire, and there felt intense delight in listening to those numerous romantic national songs and wild legends with which my native hamlet abounds.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.