o say that she would do the
dung a mischief the first time she met him. She, however, did not suffer
all her sentence, for before she had been in prison three months she
caught a disorder which carried her off. I went on selling fruit by
myself whilst she was in trouble, and for some time after her death, but
very lonely and melancholy. At last my uncle Tourlough, or, as the
English would call him, Charles, chancing to come to Scotland Road along
with his family, I was glad to accept an invitation to join them which he
gave me, and with them I have been ever since, travelling about England
and Wales and Scotland, helping my aunt with the children, and driving
much the same trade which she has driven for twenty years past, which is
not an unprofitable one."

"Would you have any objection to tell me all you do?"

"Why I sells needles, as I said before, and sometimes I buys things of
servants, and sometimes I tells fortunes."

"Do you ever do anything in the way of striopachas?"

"Oh no! I never do anything in that line; I would be burnt first. I
wonder you should dream of such a thing."

"Why surely it is not worse than buying things of servants, who no doubt
steal them from their employers, or telling fortunes, which is dealing
with the devil."

"Not worse? Yes, a thousand times worse; there is nothing so very
particular in doing them things, but striopachas--Oh dear!"

"It's a dreadful thing I admit, but the other things are quite as bad;
you should do none of them."

"I'll take good care that I never do one, and that is striopachas; them
other things I know are not quite right, and I hope soon to have done wid
them; any day I can shake them off and look people in the face, but were
I once to do striopachas I could never hold up my head."

"How comes it that you have such a horror of striopachas?"

"I got it from my mother, and she got it from hers. All Irish women have
a dread of striopachas. It's the only thing that frights them; I manes
the wild Irish, for as for the quality women I have heard they are no bit
better than the English. Come, yere hanner, let's talk of something
else."

"You were saying now that you were thinking of leaving off
fortune-telling and buying things of servants. Do you mean to depend
upon your needles alone?"

"No; I am thinking of leaving off tramping altogether and going to the
Tir na Siar."

"Isn't that America?"

"It is, yere hanner; the land of the west is Ame