keep it at all, and you after stretching out your hand with a
shilling to me, and the darkness coming on.'

He forced it into my hands so eagerly that I could not refuse it,
and set off down the road with tottering steps. When he had gone a
few yards, I called after him: 'There's your table; take it and God
speed you.'

Then I put down his table on the ground, and set off as quickly as I
was able. In a moment he came up with me, holding the table in his
hands, and slipped round in front of me so that I could not get
away.

'You wouldn't refuse it,' he said, 'and I after working at it all
day below by the river.'

He was shaking with excitement and the exertion of overtaking me; so
I took his table and let him go on his way. A quarter of a mile
further on I threw it over the ditch in a desolate place, where no
one was likely to find it.

In addition to the more genuine vagrants a number of wandering men
and women are to be met with in the northern parts of the county,
who walk out for ferns and flowers in bands of from four or five to
a dozen. They usually set out in the evening, and sleep in some
ditch or shed, coming home the next night with what they have
gathered. If their sales are successful, both men and women drink
heavily; so that they are always on the edge of starvation, and are
miserably dressed, the women sometimes wearing nothing but an old
petticoat and shawl--a scantiness of clothing that is sometimes met