mist, and a stranger who had been coming along the road from Duffelane stepped out of them abruptly quite close to Mrs. Kilfoyle’s door, before she knew that there was anybody near.  He was a tall, elderly man, gaunt and grizzled, very ragged, and so miserable-looking that Mrs. Kilfoyle could have felt nothing but compassion for him had he not carried over his shoulder a bunch of shiny cans, which was to her mind as satisfactory a passport as a ticket of leave.  For although these were yet rather early days at Lisconnel, the Tinkers had already begun to establish their reputation.  So when he stopped in front of her and said, “Good-day, ma’am,” she only replied distantly, “It’s a hardy mornin’,” and hoped he would move on.  But he said, “It’s cruel could, ma’am,” and continued to stand looking at her with wide and woful eyes, in which she conjectured—­erroneously, as it happened—­hunger for warmth or food.  Under these circumstances, what could be done by a woman who was conscious of owning a redly glowing hearth with a big black pot, fairly well filled, clucking and bobbing upon it?  To possess such wealth as this, and think seriously of withholding a share from anybody who urges the incontestable claim of wanting it, is a mood altogether foreign to Lisconnel, where the responsibilities of poverty are no doubt very imperfectly understood.  Accordingly Mrs. Kilfoyle said to the tattered tramp, “Ah, thin, step inside and have a couple of hot pitaties.”  And when he accepted the invitation without much alacrity, as if he had something else on his mind, she picked for him out of the steam two of the biggest potatoes, whose earth-colored skins, cracking, showed a fair flouriness within; and she shook a little heap of salt, the only relish she had, onto the chipped white plate as she handed it to him, saying, “Sit you down be the fire, there, and git a taste of the heat.”

Then she lifted her old shawl over her head, and ran out to see where at all Brian and Thady were gettin’ their deaths on her under the pours of rain; and as she passed the Keoghs’ adjacent door—­which was afterward the Sheridans’, whence their Larry departed so reluctantly—­young Mrs. Keogh called her to come in and look at “the child,” who, being a new and unique possession, was liable to develop alarmingly strange symptoms, and had now “woke up wid his head that hot, you might as well put your hand on the hob of the grate.”  Mrs. Kilfoyle stayed only long enough to suggest, as a possible remedy, a drop of two-milk whey.  “But ah, sure, woman dear, where at all ’ud we come by that, wid the crathur of a goat scarce wettin’ the bottom of the pan?” and to draw reassuring omens from the avidity with which the invalid grabbed at a sugared crust.  In fact, she was less than five minutes out of her house; but when she returned to it, she found it empty.  First, she noted with a moderate thrill of surprise that her visitor had gone away leaving his potatoes untouched; and next, with a rough shock of dismay, that her cloak no longer lay on the window seat where she had left it.  From that moment she never felt any real doubts about what had befallen her, though for some time she kept on trying to conjure them up, and searched wildly round and round and round her little room, like a distracted bee strayed into the hollow furze-bush, before she sped over to Mrs. O’Driscoll with the news of her loss.