thout 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 a