"I don't know. I'm looking for work."
"It's not work you need; it's rest," said the stranger.
"You've been working," I replied, looking at his covering of muck. "Why don't you clean your trousers and shoes?"
"If you were well fed you'd be as impudent as myself," said the man. "And clean my trousers and shoes! What's the good of being clean?"
"It puts the dirt away."
"It does not; it only shifts it from one place to another. And as to work—well, I work now and again, I'm sorry to say, although I done all the work that a man is put into the world to do before I was twenty-one. What's your name?"
"Dermod Flynn. What's yours?"
"Joe—Moleskin Joe, my mates calls me. Have you any tin?"
"Twopence," I replied, showing the man the remainder of the eightpence which I had picked up the night before.
"You're savin' up your fortune," he said with fine irony. "I haven't a penny itself."