my tongue.' He stopped
and beamed with satisfaction.

'Ah,' he said, 'see that now. I knew there was something about you.
I do be talking to all who do pass through this glen, telling them
stories of the Rebellion, and the old histories of Ireland, and
there's few can puzzle me, though I'm only a poor ignorant man.' He
told me some of his adventures, and then he stopped again.

'Look at me now,' he said, 'and tell me what age you think I'd be.'

'You might be seventy,' I said.

'Ah,' he said, with a piteous whine in his voice, 'you wouldn't take
me to be as old as that? No man ever thought me that age to this
day.'

'Maybe you aren't far over sixty,' I said, fearing I had blundered;
'maybe you're sixty-four.' He beamed once more with delight, and
hurried along the road.

'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.