“Assassin!  You stab me.  What a mind you have!  Look at the greed of your eyes; they would devour the grass of the fields from this place up to the Devil’s Bit.  You would lock up the air and sell it in gasping breaths.  You are disgusting.  But give me the one-and-six and to Connacht with you!  I am damning my soul standing beside you and your cart, smelling its contents.  How can a man talk with the smell of fat bacon going between him and the wind?  One-and-six and the dew that fell at the making hardly dry upon my hands yet.  Farewell, a long farewell, my Shining One; we may never meet again.”

The shawl of Mac-an-Ward’s wife had been blowing around the near-by corner while this discussion had been in progress.  It flapped against the wall in the wind like a loose sail in the rigging.  The head of the woman herself came gradually into view, one eye spying around the masonry, half-closing as it measured the comfortable proportions of Festus Clasby seated upon his cart.  As the one-and-six was counted out penny by penny into the palm of the brown hand of the Son of the Bard, the figure of his wife floated out on the open road, tossing and tacking and undecided in its direction to the eye of those who understood not the language of gestures and motions.  By a series of giddy evolutions she arrived at the cart as the last of the coppers was counted out.

“I have parted with my inheritance,” said Mac-an-Ward.  “I have sold my soul and the angels have folded their wings, weeping.”

“In other words, I have bought a tin can,” said Festus Clasby, and his frame and the entire cart shook with his chuckling.

The tinker’s wife chuckled with him in harmony.  Then she reached out her hand with a gesture that claimed a sympathetic examination of the purchase.  Festus Clasby hesitated, looking into the eyes of the woman.  Was she to be trusted?  Her eyes were clear, grey, and open, almost babyish in their rounded innocence.  Festus Clasby handed her the tin can, and she examined it slowly.

“Who sold you the Can with the Diamond Notch?” she asked.

“The man standing by your side.”

“He has wronged you.  The can is not his.”

“He says he made it.”

“Liar!  He never curved it in the piece.”

“I don’t much care whether he did or not.  It is mine now, anyhow.”

“It is my brother’s can.  No other hand made it.  Look!  Do you see this notch on the piece of sheet iron where the handle is fastened to the sides?”

“I do.”

“Is it not shaped like a diamond?”

“It is.”

“By that mark I identify it.  My brother cuts that diamond-shaped notch in all the work he puts out from his hands.  It is his private mark.  The shopkeepers have knowledge of it.  There is a value on the cans with that notch shaped like a diamond.  This man here makes cans when he is not drunk, but the notch to them is square.  The shopkeepers have knowledge of them, too, for they do not last.  The handles fall out of them.  He has never given his time to the art, and so does not know how to rivet them.”