“Troth, it’s teemin’ powerful this instiant up there in the mountains.  ’Twill be much if you land home afore it’s atop of you; for ’twould be the most I could do myself.”

And as the constables departed hastily, most people forgot the stolen cloak for a while to wonder whether their friends would escape being entirely drowned on the way back from the fair.

Mrs. Kilfoyle, however, still stood in deep dejection at her door, and said, “Och, but she was the great fool to go let the likes of him set fut widin’ her house.”

To console her Mrs. O’Driscoll said, “Ah, sure, sorra a fool were you, woman dear; how would you know the villiny of him?  And if you’d turned the man away widout givin’ him e’er a bit, it’s bad you’d be thinkin’ of it all the day after.”

And to improve the occasion for her juniors, old Mrs. Keogh added, “Aye, and morebetoken you’d ha’ been committin’ a sin.”

But Mrs. Kilfoyle replied with much candor, “’Deed, then, I’d a dale liefer be after committin’ a sin, or a dozen sins, than to have me poor mother’s good cloak thieved away on me, and walkin’ wild about the world.”

As it happened, the fate of Mrs. Kilfoyle’s cloak was very different from her forecast.  But I do not think that a knowledge of it would have teen consolatory to her by any means.  If she had heard of it, she would probably have said, “The cross of Christ upon us.  God be good to the misfort’nit crathur.”  For she was not at all of an implacable temper, and would, under the circumstances, have condoned even the injury that obliged her to appear at Mass with a flannel petticoat over her head until the end of her days.  Yet she did hold the Tinkers in a perhaps somewhat too unqualified reprobation.  For there are tinkers and tinkers.  Some of them, indeed, are stout and sturdy thieves,—­veritable birds of prey,—­whose rapacity is continually questing for plunder.  But some of them have merely the magpies’ and jackdaws’ thievish propensity for picking up what lies temptingly in their way.  And some few are so honest that they pass by as harmlessly as a wedge of high-flying wild duck.  And I have heard it said that to places like Lisconnel their pickings and stealings have at worst never been so serious a matter as those of another flock, finer of feather, but not less predacious in their habits, who roosted, for the most part, a long way off, and made their collections by deputy.

Copyrighted 1895, by Dodd, Mead and Company.

     WALLED OUT

     From ‘Bogland Studies’

     An’ wanst we were restin’ a bit in the sun on the smooth hillside,
     Where the grass felt warm to your hand as the fleece of a sheep,
                for wide,
     As ye’d look overhead an’ around, ’twas all a-blaze and a-glow,
     An’ the blue was blinkin’ up from the blackest bog-holes below;