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.

Before long I got into talk with the old man next me, and as soon as
I did so the women and girls stopped their talk and leaned out to
hear what we were saying.

He asked first if I belonged to Dingle, and I told him I did not.

'Well,' he said, 'you speak like a Kerry man, and you're dressed
like a Kerr