I asked old Dan the fiddler if he could tell me true
What lies beyond the mountains that rise so dim an blue.
I asked him if the sun would sleep among the hills at night
The time you see Tibradden dark against the golden light?

I asked him did the leprechaun hide there his pot of gold,
An' people reach a hundred and no one think them old;
And was it truth the rabbits there could talk if they'd a mind;
The cows be Christianable beasts, the goats all soft and kind?

I asked him was it true at all the fruit trees there grew wild
With pears and plums and apples to give to any child;
And had he seen the fairy farms, the weeshy sheep live there,
The tiny pigs all black an' white, the chuckins small and quare?

Old Dan the fiddler answered, “The place is there to find,
But what way would I see it an' I so nearly blind?
I've travelled all the mountain roads, the bogs where curlews cry.
I've heard the heather whisper as I was passing by.

“There's things that's plain to childher the likes of us can't see,
It's when you're old you call it dreams, an' that's the way,” says he.
We parted at the cross roads, he laughed did quare old Dan—
But I'll climb the mountains surely, the time I'm grown a man.