“I’ll take good care that I never do one, and that is striopachas; them other things I know are not quite right, and I hope soon to have done wid them; any day I can shake them off and look people in the face, but were I once to do striopachas I could never hold up my head.”
“How comes it that you have such a horror of striopachas?”
“I got it from my mother, and she got it from hers. All Irish women have a dread of striopachas. It’s the only thing that frights them; I manes the wild Irish, for as for the quality women I have heard they are no bit better than the English. Come, yere hanner, let’s talk of something else.”
“You were saying now that you were thinking of leaving off fortune-telling and buying things of servants. Do you mean to depend upon your needles alone?”
“No; I am thinking of leaving off tramping altogether and going to the Tir na Siar.”
“Isn’t that America?”
“It is, yere hanner; the land of the west is America.”
“A long way for a lone girl.”
“I should not be alone, yere hanner; I should be wid my uncle Tourlough and his wife.”
“Are they going to America?”