nothing for the plank-bed and uncomfortable diet; but he always gathered himself together, and cursed with extraordinary rage, as he told how they had cut off the white hair which had grown down upon his shoulders.  All his pride and his half-conscious feeling for the dignity of his age seemed to have set themselves on this long hair, which marked him out from the other people of his district; and I have often heard him saying to himself, as he sat beside me under a ditch:  ’What use is an old man without his hair?  A man has only his bloom like the trees; and what use is an old man without his white hair?’

Among the country people of the east of Ireland the tramps and tinkers who wander round from the west have a curious reputation for witchery and unnatural powers.  ’There’s great witchery in that country,’ a man said to me once, on the side of a mountain to the east of Aughavanna, in Wicklow.  ’There’s great witchery in that country, and great knowledge of the fairies.  I’ve had men lodging with me out of the west—­men who would be walking the world looking for a bit of money—­and every one of them would be talking of the wonders below in Connemara.  I remember one time, a while after I was married, there was a tinker down there in the glen, and two women along with him.  I brought him into my cottage to do a bit of a job, and my first child was there lying in the bed, and he covered up to his chin with the bed-clothes.  When the tallest of the women came in, she looked around at him, and then she says: 

“That’s a fine boy, God bless him.”

" How do you know it’s a boy,’ says my woman, “when it’s only the head of him you see?”

“I know rightly,” says the tinker, “and it’s the first too.”

’Then my wife was going to slate me for bringing in people to bewitch the child, and I had to turn the lot of them out to finish the job in the lane.’

I asked him where most of the tinkers came from that are met with in Wicklow.  ‘They come from every part,’ he said.  ’They’re gallous lads for walking round through the world.  One time I seen fifty of them above on the road to Rathdangan, and they all matchmaking and marrying themselves for the year that was to come.  One man would take such a woman, and say he was going such roads and places, stopping at this fair and another fair, till he’d meet them again at such a place, when the spring was coming on.  Another, maybe, would swap the woman he had with one from another man, with as much talk as if you’d be selling a cow.  It’s two hours I was there watching them from the bog underneath, where I was cutting turf and the like of the crying and kissing, and the singing and the shouting began when they went off this way and that way, you never heard in your life.  Sometimes when a party would be gone a bit down over the hill, a girl would begin crying out and wanting to go back to her ma.  Then the man would say:  “Black hell to your soul, you’ve come with me now, and you’ll go the whole way.”  I often seen tinkers before and since, but I never seen such a power of them as were in it that day.’