PREFACE

I wrote down the following legend of St. Deglan, word for word, in Irish, from the telling of my friend, Padraig O'Dalaigh, who comes himself from the Decies.

THE STORY

When Deglan was leaving Rome he held his bell in his hand, but as he was going into the ship he left the bell upon a rock that was by the harbour, and forgot to bring it with him. The ship put out to sea, with the bell left on the rock behind it.

When Deglan was coming near Ireland he remembered the bell, and knew that he had left it on the rock behind him in Rome. Old people say that long ago there used not to be much good in "a cleric without a bell."[50] Deglan knew that he would want the bell when he would land in Ireland, and he prayed God to send it to him.

At the end of a little time what should be seen swimming behind the ship but the rock and the bell on it, just as Deglan had left it at Rome. And when the vessel came to land, then the stone came into the harbour at Ardmore, and the stone comes up on the shore, and it is there yet. The stone is set high up on the top of two smaller stones, and room between the two for a man to pass out under them. If you were to see the hole you would feel certain that even a cat could not pass out through it, and yet a big man can pass through.

Every Deglan's Day, the 24th of July, and the Sunday nearest to it, thousands of people come from all over the Decies, from twenty miles away, to the "pattern," and anyone who has anything the matter with him, either disease or pain or sickness, goes in under that stone, and believes firmly in his mind that he will be healed. Hundreds do that yet, up to the present day.

About fifteen years ago the "pattern" was growing small and dying out, but a feis, the second feis in Ireland [in modern times] was held on Deglan's Sunday, and thousands and thousands of people came to it, and there had not been such a "pattern" for fifty years. I myself have often seen people passing under the stones.

Every second person in the "seana-phoball," and in the parish of Ardmore also, is called Deglan down to the present day. Scarcely a month passes that a child is not christened Deglan. The explanation that the people give of the name of the parish called "Seana-phoball," or Old Parish, is that Deglan had made a parish of it and that there were Christians there before there was a parish, or before there were Christians in any other place in Ireland, and "old phoball" is the same as "old parÓiste" or parish.

[The above story is the folk version of part of the following, which is here translated for the first time from an Irish MS. in my own possession. St. Deglan's church is spoken of in the MS. as still standing, and his miraculous stone as being still preserved there when the account was written. This throws back the account many hundreds of years. I collated my MS. carefully with one written in 1758 [23 M 50], preserved in R.I.A. It has never been printed, but I believe my friend, Father Power, will soon publish the entire life of St. Deglan.]