‘Go on, now,’ he said, ’I’m eighty-two years, three months and five days.  Would you believe that?  I was baptized on the fourth of June, eighty-two years ago, and it’s the truth I’m telling you.’

‘Well, it’s a great wonder,’ I said, ’to think you’re that age, when you’re as strong as I am to this day.’

‘I am not strong at all,’ he went on, more despondingly, ’not strong the way I was.  If I had two glasses of whisky I’d dance a hornpipe would dazzle your eyes; but the way I am at this minute you could knock me down with a rush.  I have a noise in my head, so that you wouldn’t hear the river at the side of it, and I can’t sleep at nights.  It’s that weakens me.  I do be lying in the darkness thinking of all that has happened in three-score years to the families of Wicklow—­what this son did, and what that son did, and of all that went across the sea, and wishing black hell would seize them that never wrote three words to say were they alive or in good health.  That’s the profession I have now—­to be thinking of all the people, and of the times that’s gone.  And, begging your pardon, might I ask your name?’

I told him.

‘There are two branches of the Synges in the County Wicklow,’ he said, and then he went on to tell me fragments of folk-lore connected with my forefathers.  How a lady used to ride through Roundwood ‘on a curious beast’ to visit an uncle of hers in Roundwood Park, and how she married one of the Synges and got her weight in gold—­eight stone of gold—­as her dowry stories that referred to events which took place more than a hundred years ago.

When he had finished I told him how much I wondered at his knowledge of the country.

‘There’s not a family I don’t know,’ he said, ’from Baltinglass to the sea, and what they’ve done, and who they’ve married.  You don’t know me yet, but if you were a while in this place talking to myself, it’s more pleasure and gratitude you’d have from my company than you’d have maybe from many a gentleman you’d meet riding or driving a car.’

By this time we had reached a wayside public-house, where he was evidently going with his can, so, as I did not wish to part with him so soon, I asked him to come in and take something with me.  When we went into the little bar-room, which was beautifully clean, I asked him what he would have.  He turned to the publican: 

‘Have you any good whisky at the present time?’ he said.

‘Not now, nor at any time,’ said the publican, ’we only keep bad; but isn’t it all the same for the likes of you that wouldn’t know the difference?’

After prolonged barging he got a glass of whisky, took off his hat before he tasted it, to say a prayer for my future, and then sat down with it on a bench in the corner.

I was served in turn, and we began to talk about horses and racing, as there had been races in Arklow a day or two before.  I alluded to some races I had seen in France, and immediately the publican’s wife, a young woman who had just come in, spoke of a visit she had made to the Grand Prix a few years before.