Voices of Irish "Travellers" -- "This is how I makes a cup if yer want to know how's the thing done. I sits with the anvil like a saddle between me legs. I just pick up my hammer or a stick that says to me it is going to make a right hammer, and I just hit the tin plate just straight between the eyes that's looking back at me in the mirror of me soul, and I just put together the edges of the tin to make me a handle first, and when I have the two edges bent straight in a line I hit the shape into a ladle and leave it aside me. Then I take up me snips and snip out the cup and with a clean tinwhistle you could see the snips takin' all of the tin in. Then I cuts me the circle, the brim, and I get me the rivets aside me, and I put it together with rivets or I can solder in the fire if the fire is lazy and the solder is right. It's the cleanest trade is the tin. But cleaner still sweeping, and you can clean the sky of sparrows with my little brushes..." "I just combed her hair and said there now child go off and play and patted her head with the sides of the comb to make her fine. I always plaited her hair that time in the morning and then she went out playing somewhere, I don't know where; & that morning they found the where, in the long plaited grasses by the river where she was drowned, may God rest her soul, and I never saw the place before because we never went swimming, until we went swimming that day for to get her little body out and I had a pot of stew hanging on the fire waiting ready hot for to give her. I threw it out on the grass rather than give it - my dead, my dear, dead, daughter. My young son came running in and he says to me, She's stuck, she's stuck, God help her He was so young he didn't know what had happened. He didn't know she was dead. Oh, my poor dear dead daughter, may God rest her! I hurled myself at her grave. I wrecked myself. I drank myself. I threw white paint and ashes at me mouth! I didn't want to live after and I swore I'd have no more children after. But I got ten children now, God bless them all, but it's not the same as my Bridget, may God rest her!" -- Excerpts of conversations from the book "Irish Tinkers," Wiedel & O'Fearadhaigh.