nd.

There is no village near this cottage, yet many farms are scattered
on the hills near it; and as the people are in some ways a leading
family, many men and women look in to talk or tell stories, or to
buy a few pennyworth of sugar or starch. Although the main road
passes a few hundred yards to the west, this cottage is well known
also to the race of local tramps who move from one family to another
in some special neighbourhood or barony. This evening, when I came
in, a little old man in a tall hat and long brown coat was sitting
up on the settle beside the fire, and intending to spend, one could
see, a night or more in the place.

I had a great deal to tell the people at first of my travels in
different parts of the county, to the Blasket Islands--which they
can see from here--Corkaguiney and Tralee; and they had news to
tell me also of people who have married or died since I was here
before, or gone away, or come back from America. Then I was told
that the old man, Dermot (or Darby, as he is called in English), was
the finest story-teller in Iveragh; and after a while he told us a
long story in Irish, but spoke so rapidly and indistinctly--he had
no teeth--that I could understand but few passages. When he had
finished I asked him where he had heard the story.

'I heard it in the city of Portsmouth,' he said. 'I worked there for
fifteen years, and four years in Plymouth, and a long while in the
hills of Wales; twenty-five years in all I was working at the other
side; and there were many Irish in it, who would be telling stories
in the evening, the same as we are doing here. I heard many good
stories, but what can I do with them now and I an old lisping
fellow, the way I can't give them out like a ballad?'

When he had talked a little more about his travels, and a bridge
over the Severn, that he thought the greatest wonder of the world, I
asked him if he remembered the Famine.

'I do,' he said. 'I was living near Kenmare, and many's the day I
saw them burying the corpses in the ditch by the road. It was after
that I went to England, for this country was ruined and destroyed. I
heard there was work at that time in Plymouth; so I went to Dublin
and took a boat that was going to England; but it was at a place
called Liverpool they put me on shore, and then I had to walk to
Plymouth, asking my way on the road. In that place I saw the
soldiers after coming back from the Crimea, and they all broken and
maimed.'