Voices of Irish Tinkers -- "We're queer ways travelling people. One night we'll stay and one night we'll not and we'll have the whole camp gone up and thrown into a cart, cocks and roosters and goats and all the crockery and the kettle bar and all your belongings heaped together in a heap on the back of the cart..." "I see no harm in it letting the children do for themselves with a little bit of education, but if it's all the same to you, they gets a fair amount of that at home with all they have to do -- shouting for the horses in the morning and calling for the dogs in the field and they do know how to tie a rope to more than a little dog, and how to skin a cat; they knows how to catch a fish in the river with a piece of grass, how to throw a whistling sound to the colt, a whistling coat to the foxes and how to take chicken from the jaws of a stoat, and 'tis no mean education they gets out of the hammering of tin and the hammering of their mother's voice on their little animal ears." "Besides it do be peaceful on the road. I get a queer feeling when I do hear the goats scratching on the bark of the trees and they hop around in the branches and they rock the caravan of an evening and I lean out and tell them get off heifer, get off rooster, get off, get off, and don't be rocking the old caravan. The wind does have the best job in doing that. There's no need for you to scratch me ears out with your midnight goings on." "If you ask: What's the time? do you have the time? people do be vexed and they stare at you with their calculations as if you were riding about in a painted dream on the old horse and cart. We have black teeth but we dream just the same as the people that live in houses. Just to be born on the side of the road is to go down in disrespect. " -- Excerpts, "Irish Tinkers," Martina O'Fearadhaigh & Janine Wiedel