on stitching. Nora makes the tea.}

MICHEAL {After looking at the tramp rather scornfully for a moment.}
That's a poor coat you have, God help you, and I'm thinking it's a poor
tailor you are with it.

TRAMP If it's a poor tailor I am, I'm thinking it's a poor herd does be
running back and forward after a little handful of ewes the way I seen
yourself running this day, young fellow, and you coming from the fair.

{Nora comes back to the table.}

NORA {To Micheal in a low voice.} Let you not mind him at all, Micheal
Dara, he has a drop taken and it's soon he'll be falling asleep.

MICHEAL It's no lie he's telling, I was destroyed surely. They were that
wilful they were running off into one man's bit of oats, and another
man's bit of hay, and tumbling into the red bogs till it's more like a
pack of old goats than sheep they were. Mountain ewes is a queer breed,
Nora Burke, and I'm not used to them at all.

NORA {Settling the tea things.} There's no one can drive a mountain ewe
but the men do be reared in the Glen Malure, I've heard them say, and
above by Rathvanna, and the Glen Imaal, men the like of Patch Darcy, God
spare his soul, who would walk through five hundred sheep and miss one
of them, and he not reckoning them at all.

MICHEAL {Uneasily.} Is it the man went queer in his head the year that's
gone?

NORA It is surely.

TRAMP {Plaintively.} That was a great man, young fellow, a great man I'm
telling you. There was never a lamb from his own ewes he wouldn't know
before it was marked, and he'ld run from this to the city of Dublin and
never catch for his breath.

NORA {Turning round quickly.} He was a great man surely, stranger, and
isn't it a grand thing when you hear a living man saying a good word of
a dead man, and he mad dying?

TRAMP It's the truth I'm saying, God spare his soul.

{He puts the needle under the collar of his coat, and settles himself
to sleep in the chimney-corner. Nora sits down at the table; their backs
are turned to the bed.}

MICHEAL {Looking at her with a queer look.} I heard tell this day, Nora
Burke, that it was on the path below Patch Darcy would be passing up and
passing down, and I heard them say he'ld never past it night or morning
without speaking with yourself.

NORA {In a low voice.} It was no lie you heard, Micheal Dara.

MICHEAL I'm thinking it's a power of men you're after knowing if it's in
a lonesome place you live itself.

NORA {Giving him his tea.} It's i