I do not think a beggar is ever refused in Kerry.  Sometimes, while we are talking or doing something in the kitchen, a man walks in without saying anything and stands just inside the door, with his bag on the floor beside him.  In five or ten minutes, when the woman of the house has finished what she is doing, she goes up to him and asks:  ‘Is it meal or flour?’ ‘Flour,’ says the man.  She goes into the inner room, opens her sack, and comes back with two handfuls.  He opens his bag and takes out a bundle carefully tied up in a cloth or handkerchief; he opens this again, and usually there is another cloth inside, into which the woman puts her flour.  Then the cloths are carefully knotted together by the corners, put back in the bag, and the man mutters a ‘God bless you,’ and goes on his way.

The meal, flour and potatoes that are thus gathered up are always sold by the beggar, and the money is spent on porter or second-hand clothes, or very occasionally on food when he is in a neighbourhood that is not hospitable.  The buyers are usually found among the coastguards’ wives, or in the little public-houses on the roadside.

‘Some of these men,’ said the woman of the house, when I asked her about them, ’will take their flour nicely and tastily and cleanly, and others will throw it in anyway, and you’d be sorry to eat it afterwards.’

The talk of these people is almost bewildering.  I have come to this cottage again and again, and I often think I have heard all they have to say, and then some one makes a remark that leads to a whole new bundle of folk-tales, or stories of wonderful events that have happened in the barony in the last hundred years.  Tonight the people were unusually silent, although several neighbours had come in, and to make conversation I said something about the bull-fights in Spain that I had been reading of in the newspapers.  Immediately they started off with stories of wicked or powerful bulls, and then they branched off to clever dogs and all the things they have done in West Kerry, and then to mad dogs and mad cattle and pigs—­one incident after another, but always detailed and picturesque and interesting.

I have come back to the north of Dingle, leaving Tralee late in the afternoon.  At the station there was a more than usually great crowd, as there had been a fair in the town and many people had come in to make their Saturday purchases.  A number of messenger boys with parcels from the shops in the town were shouting for the owners, using many familiar names, Justin MacCarthy, Hannah Lynch and the like.  I managed to get a seat on a sack of flour beside the owner, who had other packages scattered under our feet.  When the train had started and the women and girls—­the carriage was filled with them—­had settled down into their places, I could see I caused great curiosity, as it was too late in the year for even an odd tourist, and on this line everyone is known by sight.