ABSTRACT
For many a year mysterious little stories have been wafted to England from the Curragh—hints and glimpses of a certain colony of poor wretches there who lived as nobody else in the three kingdoms lived, and died most like people who do come within the bills of mortality—tramps and others—when they happened to perish of cold, want, and whisky, upon that vast common. In these stories there was always something so shocking that comfortable people were glad to disbelieve them, and something so strange that it was reasonable enough to set them aside: they were not probable in an orderly, commonplace, police-regulated, Christian community like our own. Besides, one could not read those little stories—paragraphs in odd corners of newspapers in the great gooseberry season—without a knowing suspicion that if only half they told was true more must have been heard of them. This seemed all the more likely because the Curragh is not an unfrequented nook in some distant corner of the land, but a plain near a capital city—an encampment wherein thousands of Englishmen as well as thousands of Irishmen constantly live, gentle and simple both, and where scores of strangers, visitors who go there for no other purpose but to see what is to be seen, peer about every week of every summer season. It did not seem at all natural that things so very unlike what ought to happen in a nineteenth century as those little wandering paragraphs hinted at could go on from year to year without investigation and arrest. But our own observation is that the wildest circumstances and most incredible anomalies of life are those which lie open to every eye, and are stared at, and are not seen. And therefore when, a few weeks ago, other little paragraphs came wafted from the Curragh—chiefly to the effect that the poor wretches of whom we have spoken are called “wrens,” “because they live in holes in the banks," and that things are not so bad as they used to be some years ago, when it was not uncommon to find a wren (or unfortunate woman) lying dead amongst the furze of a morning, we thought it worth while to ask a hardy man of brains to go and look into the matter. Hardy, we say, because it seemed to us now, as on a former occasion which we need not specify, that to ask for accurate live knowledge from official persons would be answered by the gift of a stone, as it always is. Therefore we solicited some one to go to the camp, and find the wrens (if any), and visit their nests (if any), and spend time enough by day and night amongst them to let us know what peculiar people it is of which so many incredible hints have been given—and forgotten. What the nature of the task really was, and what additional knowledge it gives us of the world we live in, will appear from the following narrative:—
