Another day, when she was trying to flatter me, she said:  ’Ah, God bless you, avourneen, you’ve no pride.  Didn’t I hear you yesterday, and you talking to my pig below in the field as if it was your brother?  And a nice clean pig it is too, the crathur.’  A year or two afterwards I met this old woman again.  Her husband had died a few months before of the ‘Influence,’ and she was in pitiable distress, weeping and wailing while she talked to me.  ’The poor old man is after dying on me,’ she said, ’and he was great company.  There’s only one son left me now, and we do be killed working.  Ah, avourneen, the poor do have great stratagems to keep in their little cabins at all.  And did you ever see the like of the place we live in?  Isn’t it the poorest, lonesomest, wildest, dreariest bit of a hill a person ever passed a life on?’ When she stopped a moment, with the tears streaming on her face, I told a little about the poverty I had seen in Paris.  ‘God Almighty forgive me, avourneen,’ she went on, when I had finished, ’we don’t know anything about it.  We have our bit of turf, and our bit of sticks, and our bit to eat, and we have our health.  Glory be to His Holy Name, not a one of the childer was ever a day ill, except one boy was hurted off a cart, and he never overed it.  It’s small right we have to complain at all.’

She died the following winter, and her son went to New York.

The old people who have direct tradition of the Rebellion, and a real interest in it, are growing less numerous daily, but one still meets with them here and there in the more remote districts.

One evening, at the beginning of harvest, as I was walking into a straggling village, far away in the mountains, in the southern half of the county, I overtook an old man walking in the same direction with an empty gallon can.  I joined him; and when we had talked for a moment, he turned round and looked at me curiously.

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘I think you aren’t Irish.’  I told him he was mistaken.

‘Well,’ he went on, ’you don’t speak the same as we do; so I was thinking maybe you were from another country.’

‘I came back from France,’ I said, ’two months ago, and maybe there’s a trace of the language still upon my tongue.’  He stopped and beamed with satisfaction.

‘Ah,’ he said, ’see that now.  I knew there was something about you.  I do be talking to all who do pass through this glen, telling them stories of the Rebellion, and the old histories of Ireland, and there’s few can puzzle me, though I’m only a poor ignorant man.’  He told me some of his adventures, and then he stopped again.

‘Look at me now,’ he said, ‘and tell me what age you think I’d be.’

‘You might be seventy,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he said, with a piteous whine in his voice, ’you wouldn’t take me to be as old as that?  No man ever thought me that age to this day.’

‘Maybe you aren’t far over sixty,’ I said, fearing I had blundered; ‘maybe you’re sixty-four.’  He beamed once more with delight, and hurried along the road.