J·:)URNAL OF THE COUNTY DONEGAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY Un'il you do return again to Erin's lovely home. Mr. 0 Lochlamn's version of 1·11e Mamie So Urt:en (i\o. 'l) i·s based on the common th~me of a aam»'21 courted by a stranger who begs her Lo be his, as her own true love is dead or dis~oyal, and, on p::oving her faith, reveals that he himself is the lad whose absence sne bewails. The heraldic · symbolism is rather late : the heroine ha's the name of her lover embroidered in letters of gold on her "mantle so green." The new suitor reads the name: Young William O'Reilly appe.ared to my view, He was my chief comrade in famed Waterloo .... We fought for three days till the fourth afternoon, He received bis death summons on the l6th of June. The stranger has, somehow, got iposses•sion of the love token 1worn by the dead man, a gold ring, and on sight ·of this she grows pale, with a heart full of woe, until he revea1s his indentity Oh! Nancy, dear Nancy, 'tis I won your heart In your fa.tber's garden that day we did part. My traditional version abstains from the ha.ippy e'.nding. When the lady hears that William is dead she says : If that be the case then I won't lie afraid I'll go to the field where my true love is laid; And· there as a maiden that is constant and true, I'll search for my dead love in famed Waterloo. Ballad 55 in Mr. 0 Locblainn's collection has : There's a place in my father's garden, lovely Willie, said she, Where lords, dukes and earls they wait upon me, But when they are sleeping in their long silent rest 1"11 go with you, lovely Willie, you're the boy I love best. 282. This lovely Willie is, however, slain at once by the lady's father who had O\>'err.eard her proposal. In Ballad 94 the lady rejects the strange s:.iitor's blandishments - Now kind sir, since I must tell you, I am promised these five years and more, 'l•o one O'Reilly from the County Leitrim, Which often grieves my poor heart full sore. The common features of the foregoing documentation present the story of a gentleman's daughter (Nancy), who loves a young man named William or Willie O'Reilly, probably a native of County Leitrim, who is engaged as a gardener or in some other menial post in her father's household. .She persuades him to run away with her and gives him a large sum of money. Her father pursues and caiptures them and has the young man tried and trans'ported. Whatever the details of his Odyssey aDroad, his Pe·nelope remains faithful at home until he re.t,urns and is identified on ;producing the ring which he had had from her as a love token. Alternatively he dies a.broad (Waterloo). 11 n l1 <).illiam Carleton, in his \W Edition of his novel Preface to 1the lst ''Willy Reilly," says t h a t he found the. ballad on which his sLory 'was based "'in a state of wretched disorder" and that the stanzas as published in that Preface had been re-arranged by him to remedy "the confusion to which uniprinted poetry, sung by an uneducated people, is liable." This was written in 1'855, but. Carleton's version of the ballad had already appeared in Gavan Duffy's Ballad Poetry of Ireland in 1845 and may now be found in any edition of "Willy Reilly" as well as in a number of poipular anthologies. Carleton implies
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