While indulging these _grave_ reflections, I saw a man approach by the path I lately trod. He was far advanced in the decline of life; his tall figure, which he supported with a long staff, was wrapped in a blue-grey coat that folded close under a hair cincture, and the woollen hat, susceptible of every impression, was drawn over his face, as if to screen it from the sharp blast that rushed athwart his way. He suddenly stopped, then fixed his glance upon a certain spot of the burial ground where stood a blasted and branchless whitethorn, that seemed to have partaken of the ruin of the ancient fabric, over whose gross-grown foundation it yet lingered. Then raising his eyes to heaven, he sank upon his knees, while his lips moved as if in the utterance of some fervid ejaculation. Surely, thought I, this old man’s elevated devotion, at such a place and time, proceeds not solely from the ordinary motives that induce the penitent to pray--some circumstance, some tradition connected with this ancient place, has wrought his piety to this pitch of enthusiasm. Thus did my fancy conjecture at the moment, nor was I mistaken. As the old man rose from his attitude of supplication, I approached and said, “My friend, I hope you will pardon this intrusion, for your sudden and impassioned devotion has greatly awakened my curiosity.” He immediately answered in the Irish tongue, “I was only begging mercy and pardon for the souls who in the close darkness of the prison-house cannot relieve themselves, and beseeching that heaven would cease to visit upon the children the guilt of their fathers. This spot brought to my memory an act of sacrilege which my forefathers perpetrated, and for which their descendants yet suffer; and I did not conceive at the moment that a living being beheld me but God. “Perhaps,” he continued, “as you seem to be a stranger in these parts, you have never heard of the Bald Barrys, and the blessed Whitethorn of Kildinan. It is an old tradition, and you may be inclined to name it a legend of superstition; but yonder is the whitethorn, blasted and decayed from the contact of my ancestors’ unholy hands; and here stands the last of their name, a homeless wanderer, with no other inheritance than this mark of the curse and crime of his race.” So saying, he pulled off the old woollen hat, and exhibited his head perfectly smooth and guiltless of a single hair. “That old heads should become bald, is no uncommon occurrence,” I observed, “and I have seen younger heads as hairless as yours.” “My head,” he returned, “from my birth to this moment, never knew a single hair; my father and grandfather endured the same privation, while my great-grandfather was deprived of his long and copious locks in one tearful moment. I shall tell you the story as we go along, if your course lies in the direction of this pathway.”