... although someone he meets, the 'little flaxen-headed girl', I now recall, asks him how does he do "With your rags and your tags and your ould rigadoo" ~~ but that scarcely makes the whole song 'the tale of his ould rigadoo', does it? The 'rigadoo' motif does seem at the end to have taken the whole song over by its symbolic power, doesn't it? Is that because the term has expanded, by a sort of metonomy as I suggest above, to symbolise the whole of the begging life?

~M~