went back to our beds.

In the morning the woman told me his story:

'He was living above on a little hillside,' she said, 'in a bit of a
cabin, with his sister along with him. Then, after a while, she got
ailing in her heart, and he got a bottle for her from the doctor,
and he'd rise up every morning before the dawn to give her a sup of
it. She got better then, till one night he got up and measured out
the spoonful, or whatever it was, and went to give it to her, and he
found her stretched out dead before him. Since that night he wakes
up one time and another, and begins crying out for Maurya--that was
his sister--and he half in his dreams. It was that you heard in the
night, and indeed it would frighten any person to hear him screaming
as if he was getting his death.'

When the little man came back after a while, they began asking him
questions till he told his whole story, weeping pitiably. Then they
got him to tell me about the other great event of his life also, in
the rather childish Gaelic he uses.

He had once a little cur-dog, he said, and he knew nothing of the
dog licence; then one day the peelers--the boys with the little
caps--asked him into the barracks for a cup of tea. He went in
cheerfully, and then they put him and his little dog into the
lock-up till some one paid a shilling for him and got him out.

He has a stick he is proud of, bound with pieces of leather every
few inches--like one I have seen with a beggar in Belmullet. Since
the first night he has not had nightmare again, and he lies most of
the evening sleeping on the settle, and in the morning he goes round
among the houses, getting his share of meal and potatoes.

I do not think a beggar is ever refused in Kerry. Sometimes, while
we are talking or doing something in the kitchen, a man walks in
without saying anything and stands just inside the door, with his
bag on the floor beside him. In five or ten minutes, when the woman
of the house has finished what she is doing, she goes up to him and
asks: 'Is it meal or flour?' 'Flour,' says the man. She goes into
the inner room, opens her sack, and comes back with two handfuls. He
opens his bag and takes out a bundle carefully tied up in a cloth or
handkerchief; he opens this again, and usually there is another
cloth inside, into which the woman puts her flour. Then the cloths
are carefully knotted together by the corners, put back in the bag,
and the man mutters a 'God bless you,' and goes