eges. The tramp in
Ireland is little troubled by the laws, and lives in out-of-door
conditions that keep him in good-humour and fine bodily health. This
is so apparent, in Wicklow at least, that these men rarely seek for
charity on any plea of ill-health, but ask simply, when they beg:
'Would you help a poor fellow along the road?' or, 'Would you give
me the price of a night's lodging, for I'm after walking a great way
since the sun rose?'

The healthiness of this life, again, often causes people to live to
a great age, though it is not always easy to test the stories that
are told of their longevity. One man, however, who died not long
ago, claimed to have reached one hundred and two with a show of
likelihood; for several old people remember his first appearance in
a certain district as a man of middle age, about the year of the
Famine, in 1847 or 1848. This man could hardly be classed with
ordinary tramps, for he was married several times in different parts
of the world, and reared children of whom he seemed to have
forgotten, in his old age, even the names and sex. In his early life
he spent thirty years at sea, where he sailed with some one he spoke
of afterwards as 'Il mio capitane,' visiting India and Japan, and
gaining odd words and intonations that gave colour to his language.
When he was too old to wander in the world, he learned all the paths
of Wicklow, and till the end of his life he could go the thirty
miles from Dublin to the Seven Churches without, as he said,
'putting out his foot on a white road, or seeing any Christian but
the hares and moon.' When he was over ninety he married an old woman
of eighty-five. Before many days, however, they quarrelled so
fiercely that he beat her with his stick, and came out again on the
roads. In a few hours he was arrested at her complaint, and
sentenced to a month in Kuilmainham. He cared nothing for the
plank-bed and uncomfortable diet; but he always gathered himself
together, and cursed with extraordinary rage, as he told how they
had cut off the white hair which had grown down upon his shoulders.
All his pride and his half-conscious feeling for the dignity of his
age seemed to have set themselves on this long hair, which marked
him out from the other people of his district; and I have often
heard him saying to himself, as he sat beside me under a ditch:
'What use is an old man without his hair? A man has only his bloom
like the trees; and what use is an old man wi