[52] This passage about Bobhur is not in the R.I.A. copy only the part about the Duibhin.
[53] Mo chathair si agus mo thigheas easbogoidheacht in my MS. "Mo theaghdhais easbogoideachta" 23 M 50. 1758.
Deglan, that holy man, went on shore, and he gave praise and glory and thanks to God because that he had reached the place of his resurrection on that island, where the sheep of the king of the Déise used to be kept usually and herded. And there was a pleasant high hill on it. And one of his disciples said to Deglan on going to the top of that hill "how shall this Ard beag (Little Height) support thy people."
"Beloved son," said Deglan, "say not so. This is no Little Height, but an Ard Mór (Great Height)," and the name has clung to it ever since, namely Ardmore of Deglan.
[Illustration: THE LANDING OF ST. DEGLAN AT ARDMORE]
ST. PAUL'S VISION; OR, THE LAST END OF THE MAN WHO LEADS A BAD LIFE.
I took the following very curious account from an Irish MS. a couple of hundred years old, which had been thrown away on a loft in a farm house in the County Meath before I secured it. There are other copies of this story in the Royal Irish Academy, and a fragment in the library of University College, Dublin, but mine is the best copy I have met. There is no other version, so far as I know, of St. Paul's Vision that is at all like this. The Vision was at one time well known in Europe. It was at first, according to Tischendorf, probably composed in Greek, and there is a version of it in Syrian and another in Latin. The story is also found in old High German, in Danish, French and Slavonic. The best and longest Latin version is to be found in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, but there is not a word in it, nor in the Greek, nor in the Syrian, of the driving of the soul out of the body, or of the angel Michael's guiding St. Paul to the bedside of the dying man. As it is unlikely that some Irish Gael composed all this out of his own head, I can only surmise that it is a translation of a Latin or Greek original now lost, and that the story now survives through its translation into Irish alone.
We know that the Irish have saved for us several pieces of an apocryphal or mystic character, whose originals are now lost, such as the extraordinary piece called the "Ever-new Tongue," and the "Vision of Tundal."