sentenced to a month in Kuilmainham. He cared nothing for the
plank-bed and uncomfortable diet; but he always gathered himself
together, and cursed with extraordinary rage, as he told how they
had cut off the white hair which had grown down upon his shoulders.
All his pride and his half-conscious feeling for the dignity of his
age seemed to have set themselves on this long hair, which marked
him out from the other people of his district; and I have often
heard him saying to himself, as he sat beside me under a ditch:
'What use is an old man without his hair? A man has only his bloom
like the trees; and what use is an old man without 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?"