Brian Gallagher recalls - "My uncle was 53 when he and the young family emigrated to NY from a hungry mountainside in North Leitrim. He had left it too late. They said that at the foot of the aeroplane steps he stopped and made an attempt to go back. Along with the good navy blue suit, the shirt with detachable collars, the box of collar studs and the pair of light boots, he had packed his fiddle and bow, lovingly wrapped in sheets of newspaper. But he never played it in America and it stayed in a bottom drawer in yellowing sheets of "The Leitrim Observer." His letters were all about home with never a mention of his new life, and always, always he wanted to know what was the price of black cattle in Collooney Fair. On the one occasion he came back, he made his way to the house where my father and he were reared and with a pliers he pulled from the wall the nail on which he used to hang his fiddle. He brought it back to his NY home, hammered it into the wall there and that night, he played "The Boys of Ballisodare" and hung his fiddle on it again. I went back to North Leitrim a few years ago to visit the old house. I had been there once before as a child with my father. Now I carried my own son on my shoulders. Round a bend up a steep lane I suddenly came face to face with an old man coming down. He stopped and looked at me and said, 'Eddie!' 'That was my father name,' I said. 'Well if your father was made young again, that's him walking up the lane.' He spoke in that courtly way you only find in country places and he turned to walk back a bit with me and show me the way . He kept looking at me as if he couldn't believe his eyes. 'Would there be any chance that you would come back and do up the house,' he said, 'I would love to see someone above me on the mountain. There was smoke from all those chimneys,' he said, pointing out the ruined houses on the mountain face. 'I rambled in every one of those houses but they're all gone now.' 'Did you ever think of going away yourself,' I asked. 'I was never further than Collooney Fair,' he said, 'Never further than the fair of Collooney'. 'What about your family,' I said. 'I have a son in Philadelphia,' he said. 'I was out ot see him last year. I have another son in Los Angeles. I went out to see him the year before. It's on the far side of America. The lane's bad but it's dry underfoot. Mind the little fellow.' Gentle regular undulations of the grass were all that marked where my uncle's garden of brown sharp-edged ridges had been. Nettles and brambles were growing up to the open doorway. The boy wrinkled his nose at the smell of the calves in the kitchen. And through the broken window I could still see the nail hole in the wall and the track of the pliers in the flaking pink distemper. When I had seen enough, I turned to go. The old man was waiting for me at the gap in the hedge . He had a paper bag in his hands, and there was something he wanted to say. 'You see, I never cut a sod in America,' he said, 'so it didn't count. It was only socialising. There's some apples for the boy. My two lads always liked them. You were always a fine big man, Eddie,' and he was gone through the gap in the hedge. I didn't know if he was sane or mad. It was an unsettling conversation. In the car, when I opened the bag, the apples had hard cracked skin and black spots from years of neglect, but the flesh inside was sweet and wholesome. As I looked at them, I realized that the old man had not spoken to me at all. He had been talking to a ghost, the ghost of a long-dead neighbour he had met walking up a line in Leitrim." -- Excerpt, "The Leitrim Guardian"