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about the poverty I had seen in Paris.

      ‘God Almighty forgive me, Avourneen,’ she went on, when I had finished, ‘we don’t know anything about it. We have our bit of turf, and our bit of sticks, and our bit to eat, and we have our health. Glory be to His Holy Name, not a one of the childer was ever a day ill, except one boy was hurted off a cart, and he never overed it. It’s small right we have to complain at all.’

      She died the following winter, and her son went to New York.

      The old people who have direct tradition of the Rebellion, and a real interest in it, are growing less numerous daily, but one still meets with them here and there in the more remote districts.

      One evening, at the beginning of harvest, as I was walking into a straggling village, far away in the mountains, in the southern half of the county, I overtook an old man walking in the same direction with an empty gallon can. I joined him; and when he had talked for a moment, he turned round and looked at me curiously.

      ‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘I think you aren’t Irish.’ I told him he was mistaken.

      ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘you don’t speak the same as we do; so I was thinking maybe you were from another country.’

      ‘I came back from France,’ I said, ‘two months ago, and maybe there’s a trace of the language still upon my tongue.’ He stopped and beamed with satisfaction.

      ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘see that now. I knew there was something about you. I do be talking to all who do pass through this glen, telling them stories of the Rebellion, and the old histories of Ireland, and there’s few can puzzle me, though I’m only a poor ignorant man.’ He told me some of his adventures, and then he stopped again.

      ‘Look at me now,’ he said, ‘and tell me what age you think I’d be.’

      ‘You might be seventy,’ I said.

      ‘Ah,’ he said, with a piteous whine in his voice, ‘you wouldn’t take me to be as old as that? No man ever thought me that age to this day.’

      ‘Maybe you aren’t far over sixty,’ I said, fearing I had blundered, ‘maybe you’re sixty-four.’ He beamed once more with delight, and hurried along the road.

      ‘Go on, now,’ he said, ‘I’m eighty-two years, three months and five days. Would you believe that? I was baptised on the fourth of June, eighty-two years ago, and it’s the truth I’m telling you.’

      ‘Well, it’s a great wonder,’ I said, ‘to think you’re that age, when you’re as strong as I am to this day.’

      ‘I am not strong at all,’ he went on, more despondingly, ‘not strong the way I was. If I had two glasses of whisky I’d dance a hornpipe would dazzle your eyes; but the way I am at this minute you could knock me down with a rush. I have a noise in my head, so that you wouldn’t hear the river at the side of it, and I can’t sleep at nights. It’s that weakens me. I do be lying in the darkness thinking of all that has happened in three-score years to the families of Wicklow – what this son did, and what that son did, and of all that went across the sea, and wishing black hell would seize them that never wrote three words to say were they alive or in good health. That’s the profession I have now – to be thinking of all the people, and of the times that’s gone. And, begging your pardon, might I ask your name?’ I told him.

      ‘There are two branches of the Synges in the County Wicklow,’ he said, and then he went on to tell me fragments of folklore connected with my forefathers. How a lady used to ride through Roundwood ‘on a curious beast’ to visit an uncle of hers in Roundwood Park, and how she married one of the Synges and got her weight in gold – eight stone of gold – as her dowry: stories that referred to events which took place more than a hundred years ago.

      When he had finished I told him how much I wondered at his knowledge of the country.

      ‘There’s not a family I don’t know,’ he said, ‘from Baltinglass to the sea, and what they’ve done, and who they’ve married. You don’t know me yet, but if you were a while in this place talking to myself, it’s more pleasure and gratitude you’d have from my company than you’d have maybe from many a gentleman you’d meet riding or driving a car.’

      By this time we had reached a wayside public house, where he was evidently going with his can, so, as I did not wish to part with him so soon, I asked him to come in and take something with me. When we went into the little bar-room, which was beautifully clean, I asked him what he would have. He turned to the publican:

      ‘Have you any good whisky at the present time?’ he said.

      ‘Not now; nor at any time,’ said the publican, ‘we only keep bad; but isn’t it all the same for the likes of you that wouldn’t know the difference?’

      After prolonged barging he got a glass of whisky, took off his hat before he tasted it, to say a prayer for my future, and then sat down with it on a bench in the corner.

      I was served in turn, and we began to talk about horses and racing, as there had been races in Arklow a day or two before. I alluded to some races I had seen in France, and immediately the publican’s wife, a young woman who had just come in, spoke of a visit she had made to the Grand Prix a few years before.

      ‘Then you have been in France?’ I asked her.

      ’For eleven years,’ she replied.

      ’Alors vous parlez français, Madame?’

      ’Mais oui, Monsieur,’ she answered with pure intonation.

      We had a little talk in French, and then the old man got his can filled with porter – the evening drink for a party of reapers who were working on the hill – bought a pennyworth of sweets and went back down the road.

      ‘That’s the greatest old rogue in the village,’ said the publican, as soon as he was out of hearing. ‘He’s always making up to all who pass through the place, and trying what he can get out of them. The other day a party told me to give him a bottle of XXX porter he was after asking for. I just gave him the dregs of an old barrel we had finished, and there he was, sucking in his lips, and saying it was the finest drink ever he tasted, and that it was rising to his head already, though he’d hardly a drop of it swallowed. Faith in the end I had to laugh to hear the talk he was making.’

      A little later I wished them good evening and started again on my walk, as I had two mountains to cross.

      At a Wicklow Fair

      ❖

      The Place and the People

      A year or two ago I wished to visit a fair in County Wicklow, and as the buying and selling in these fairs are got through very early in the morning I started soon after dawn to walk the ten or twelve miles that led to Aughrim, where the fair was to be held. When I came out into the air, the cold was intense, though it was a morning of August, and the dew was so heavy that bushes and meadows of mountain grass seemed to have lost their greenness in silvery grey. In the glens I went through white mists were twisting and feathering themselves into extraordinary shapes, and showing blue hills behind them that looked singularly desolate and far away. At every turn I came on multitudes of rabbits feeding on the roadside, or on even shyer creatures – corncrakes, squirrels and snipe – close to villages where no one was awake.

      Then the sun rose, and I could see lines of smoke beginning to go up from farmhouses under the hills, and sometimes a sleepy, half-dressed girl looked out of the door of a cottage when my feet echoed on the road.

      About six miles from Aughrim I began to fall in with droves of bullocks and sheep, in charge of two or three dogs and a herd, or with whole families of mountain people, driving nothing but a single donkey or kid. These people seemed to feel already the animation of the fair, and were talking eagerly and gaily among themselves. I did not hurry, and it was about nine o’clock when I made my way into the village, which was now thronged with cattle and sheep.

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