As he and the tanned, whiskered men rumbled through the gate and drove up to me in an old Mercedes truck, the farmer cocked his chin to the left and flashed me a look that seemed to say, "Ah, life can be tough, can't it?"

I waved and they all waved back cheerfully. Darned if Flo hadn't been right, I thought with a chuckle.

Later, further up the road in a tightly-packed village named Gormanstown, I stopped at a little sundry shop which was but two or three feet from the road. There I picked up a copy of the Irish Independent. In it was a story about my walking through Ireland.

I asked the woman behind the counter for a cone with two scoops of banana-flavored ice cream. While she served it up, I set the newspaper on the counter top and read the article.

Like most Ameicans, he claims to have Irish ancestorsthe writer wrote at one point. I smiled and chuckled to myself. The Irish couldnt even do a newspaper story without putting some humor in it.

"Is that you in the photo?" the shop woman asked.

"Yes. It's an article about me walking around the world."

She gave me the ice cream for free. "I've no doubt you'll be the only person I'll meet walking around the world," she said quite proudly.

Just north of the village I passed dozens of delapidated trailer homes parked on the road's shoulders. The trailers were little ones no longer than twenty feet and with only one axle. The tires were still on the wheels, and so it looked as if their occupants planned on living beside the road only temporarily.

Piled outside of the cheap trailers were such items as carpet rolls and auto junk parts for sale. The whole scene was one of a poor mini ghetto: clothes hanging from bushes and rickety lines, small children running about in soiled clothing and mean looks, and litter and garbage of all sorts scattered about.

Some of the children charged toward me demanding money--usually a two-pence. They and the adults were a rough-looking people, and I knew it must be awful trying to cram an entire family into one of those trailers for dinner or bedtime.

Since there were no water hook-ups or toilet buildings anywhere, they must have depended upon the hedges and tall weeds of the farms they were camped alongside.

There were some of these nomadic camps, however, where the people looked quite well-off. Their trailers were later models, cleaner, and parked alongside them were new and quite expensive vans and autos.

Later on I learned from several people that those I had passed living alongside the highway were the "caravan people," or "gypsies" as they were once known. They are a by-product of the Great Potato Famine of the 1800's. During the potato failure of that century, millions of small farmers who tended their plots on the larger, feudal-like farms of the rich were uprooted and forced to give up everything and move on. Some of the rich land barons saw the famine as a convenient time to shove many of the tenents off the over-populated estates.

The population of Ireland at that time was around 9.5 to 10.5 million, but after the potato failure the population was to shrink to just below its present 4.5 million.

Those who emigrated to such areas as the United States were to number around 100,000 a year for many years. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that most Irish have relatives in North America. Indeed, nearly everyone I've talked to in Ireland had someone from their family's past move to Canada or the U.S. As one retired farmer, Tom Mills, put it so wonderfully: "The failies were big, the land small."

Many of this new class of nomads didn't leave the country, however, but chose to stay and remain rootless. They became the gypsies, the forerunners to today's caravan people. The caravan people of today are named after the mobile trailers they live out of, which in Europe are known as "caravans."

At first I didn't know what to think when their children came up to me to beg for money. They looked so poor, and yet knowing how children are inclined to waste money on such things as candy, I was able to justify to myself my turning away from them. Yet, they came to me frequently--enough so as to be a real nuisance. I was only too glad when I reached the outskirts of the port city of Drogheda and had no more of their camps to walk through.

There I stopped at a small grocery store and sat outside on the street curb, to drink a pint of milk and eat a peanut butter sandwich. But no sooner had I taken one bite from the sandwich than yet another begger approached. She came from an adjoining low-income housing complex. This time it wasn't a child, but rather a short dark-haired woman of about my age. Trailing her were two little girls, one of them about eleven and pushing a stroller with an infant asleep in it.

I might have left, except that I had food and things from my backpack scattered all about me. The woman came right to me with absolutely no hesitation.

"Good day, dear kind sir. May the dear Virgin Mary bless ya," she said softly. "Have ya a couple of pounds to give me so's I can feed the young children? They've nothing to eat all day, and there's nothing in the house. God bless ya for helping us."

Standing over me in her long, black dress with stains of all sorts on it, and with heavy white stocklongs on her thick legs, she knew she had me trapped. When I didn't reply immediately, she pressed harder.

"Just two pounds, sir. God and the Virgin Mary will bless you, and I'll pray for ya."

"Hold it!" I nearly shouted in anger. What upset me the most was not the begging, but the fact that she was practically demanding three dollars worth of money. What ever happened to the Have you a dime or a quarter to spare,please?

"Where's your husband? Isn't he working?" I demanded.

"He left us several months ago. I don't make any money myself, 'cause there's no work. Just a couple of pounds, and I'll pray for ya dear kind man."

I looked the children over from the hot pavement. They didn't look the least bit deprived or hungry. And yet how could I really be sure they weren't actually going hungry? Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the shopkeeper looking disgustedly at the begger woman.

"I tell you what. I'll buy some food for the children," I said, with resignation.

She looked a bit disappointed. "Yes...yes. May holy Mary bless ya."

I had to gather everything back into the backpack, throw away the now dry sandwich, and carry the whole load back into the store. I purchased a quart of milk from a rack on the store (milk is often kept at room temperature in Ireland's stores), as well as a loaf of bread, and brought the items out to her.

She took them without so much as a "thank you" and walked away. I went back into the store to replace my sandwich. While I was standing in line at the register counter, I looked outside and saw the begger woman talking to a carload of caravan people who had just pulled up. They all laughed heartily at something she said, and then a woman in the front seat of the Ford Capri stuck a one-pound note out the window. The beggar woman handed over the food and took the money. She waved them good-bye, put the note in her pocket, and shooed the children further along the street.

Right then I decided not to give in to any more beggars on the rest of my walk, except perhaps for those who were handicapped and obviously unable to work.

Deep inside I felt incensed at all the begging I'd had to face that day. If only a handful of beggers in Ireland could make me feel so upset, what would I be like in countries like India or Bangladesh?

Better to set some sort of iron-clad policy now, rather than risk a violent confrontation later in a more strange and perhaps more hostile environment. In one sense, I guessed the beggers had been good for me: they'd forced me to face the situation while I was still early into the walk.

Steven