"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 as were in it that
day.'

It need hardly be said that in all tramp life plaintive and tragic
elements are common, even on the surface. Some are peculiar to
Wicklow. In these hills the summer passes in a few weeks from a late