finished I asked him where he had heard the story.

'I heard it in the city of Portsmouth,' he said. 'I worked there for
fifteen years, and four years in Plymouth, and a long while in the
hills of Wales; twenty-five years in all I was working at the other
side; and there were many Irish in it, who would be telling stories
in the evening, the same as we are doing here. I heard many good
stories, but what can I do with them now and I an old lisping
fellow, the way I can't give them out like a ballad?'

When he had talked a little more about his travels, and a bridge
over the Severn, that he thought the greatest wonder of the world, I
asked him if he remembered the Famine.

'I do,' he said. 'I was living near Kenmare, and many's the day I
saw them burying the corpses in the ditch by the road. It was after
that I went to England, for this country was ruined and destroyed. I
heard there was work at that time in Plymouth; so I went to Dublin
and took a boat that was going to England; but it was at a place
called Liverpool they put me on shore, and then I had to walk to
Plymouth, asking my way on the road. In that place I saw the
soldiers after coming back from the Crimea, and they all broken and
maimed.'

A little later, when he went out for a moment, the people told me he
beats up and down between Killorglin and Ballinskelligs and the Inny
river, and that he is a particular crabby kind of man, and will not
take anything from the people but coppers and eggs.

'And he's a wasteful old fellow with all,' said the woman of the