The Bennington evening banner. (Bennington, Vt.) 19??-1961, 1913-10-30

sEuMAs MAeMANUs COMING
Famous Irish Poet and Author Com
ing To Bennington.


ing To Bennington.
Seumas MacManus, OF Donegal,
Ireland. the Irish writer and lectur'
er has been secured by the knights
of Columbus to lecture at Academy
hall November 5. All who are ac-
quainted with MacManus' irish stor-
les, in the leading magazines, or
| with his books, need hardly be told
that he got his knowledge of the
wit and humor and poetry and
pathos of Irish life at first hand.
| From his cradle he looked out every
| day on the rugged mountains and
cliffs of wayelashed Donegal; and
he heard the Donegal caileens sing
| ing round him the old Gaelic lullab-
les and listened to the cronies and
shanachies, who dropped every night
into his fathe''s cottage on the
mounlain-side, chant the ancient
Irish poems and tell the thousand
years old legends and tales. In fact
he was sucked on the very lore
which he has now for ten years been
giving to the American public. The
fourteen or fifteen books of fairy
tales and of original story and dra-
ma that he has given to the world,
since at the age Of eighteen he was
appointed the mountain schoolmas-
ter, form only small part of the
great wealth of Irish lore which he
imbibed as a child. In his Lad of
the OFriels" and his Donegal Fairy
Stories and his Ballads of a Coun-
try Boy among others. he gives us
Irish life and character and Irish
song and Irish story. Irish humor
and pathos, combined like the sun
shine and mists of his native hills.
AS a barefoot boy he was so fond
Of the old firesde stories that he
tramped the hills nightly to hear
or regular story teller--for every dis
trict among the hills of Ireland has
its own honored shanachy who is a
repository of ali the old lore, and
who on the long winter nights en-
tertains the big circle of happy-faced
ones who listen spelLbound to the
tales, sitting around the glowing
peat fire, with the yellow frelight
dancing over their faces, and flicker
ing over the smoke blacked rafters
above them. The barefoot boy who
sat Open-mouthed in the corner did
net then in his widest dream
imagine that he would one day be
telling the same stories to an au
dience stretching from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Pacific and from the
Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico
or that he would be interpreting to
all America the poetry and the
pathos and wit which he saw and
felt and heard around him.
At the age of eighteen he became
schoolmaster of the little mountain
school at which he himself had been
taught to read and write and figure.
And after seven years teaching and
dreaming during the day and writ.
ing and dreaming during the night,
he babe goodbye to his scholars and
old friends and neighbors, and. like
the hero in his own fairy tales, sci
out to push his fortune-in America
From the steerage of trans-At
lantic liner he landed here on
beautiful day in fall ten years ago
his name utterly unknown to any
one in America except exled boys
and girls from his own mountain
parish. After seven months of
America, he sailed for home in the
May following with his humorous
Irish stories printed, and being
printed, in every leading magazine
in the county and his first American
book. Through the Turf Smoke"
selling in repeated editions from
New York TO San Francisco.