Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry | Page 6

pleased to trail after
him between the two opposing powers. This characteristic challenge is
soon accepted; the knocking down and yelling are heard; stones fly,
and every available weapon is pressed into the service on both sides. In
this manner the battle proceeds, until, probably, a life or two is lost.
Bones, too, are savagely broken, and blood copiously spilled, by men
who scarcely know the remote cause of the enmity between the parties.
Such is a hasty sketch of the Pattern, as it is called in Ireland, at which
Larry and Sheelah duly performed their station. We, for our parts,
should be sorry to see the innocent pastimes of a people abolished; but,
surely, customs which perpetuate scenes of profligacy and crime should
not be suffered to stain the pure and holy character of religion.
It is scarcely necessary to inform our readers that Larry O'Toole and
Sheelah complied with every rite of the Station. To kiss the "Lucky
Stone," however, was their principal duty. Larry gave it a particularly
honest smack, and Sheelah impressed it with all the ardor of a devotee.
Having refreshed themselves in the tent, they returned home, and, in
somewhat less than a year from that period, found themselves the
happy parents of an heir to the half-acre, no less a personage than
young Phelim, who was called after St. Phelim, the patron of the
"Lucky Stone."
The reader perceives that Phelim was born under particularly
auspicious influence. His face was the herald of affection everywhere.
From the moment of his birth, Larry and Sheelah were seldom known
to have a dispute. Their whole future life was, with few exceptions, one
unchanging honeymoon. Had Phelim been deficient in comeliness, it
would have mattered not a crona baun. Phelim, on the contrary,
promised to be a beauty; both, his parents thought it, felt it, asserted it;
and who had a better right to be acquainted, as Larry said, "wid the outs
an' ins, the ups an' downs of his face, the darlin' swaddy!"
For the first ten years of his life Phelim could not be said to owe the
tailor much; nor could the covering which he wore be, without more

antiquarian loire than we can give to it, exactly classed under any
particular term by which the various parts of human dress are known.
He himself, like some of our great poets, was externally well
acquainted with the elements. The sun and he were particularly intimate;
wind and rain were his brothers, and frost also distantly related to him.
With mud he was hand and glove, and not a bog in the parish, or a
quagmire in the neighborhood, but sprung up under Phelim's tread, and
threw him forward with the brisk vibration of an old acquaintance.
Touching his dress, however, in the early part of his life, if he was
clothed with nothing else, he was clothed with mystery. Some assert
that a cast-off pair of his father's nether garments might be seen upon
him each Sunday, the wrong side foremost, in accommodation with
some economy of his mother's, who thought it safest, in consequence of
his habits, to join them in this inverted way to a cape which he wore on
his shoulders. We ourselves have seen one, who saw another, who saw
Phelim in a pair of stockings which covered him from his knee-pans to
his haunches, where, in the absence of waistbands, they made a
pause--a breach existing from that to the small of his back. The person
who saw all this affirmed, at the same time, that there was a dearth of
cloth about the skirts of the integument which stood him instead of a
coat. He bore no bad resemblance, he said, to-a moulting fowl, with
scanty feathers, running before a gale in the farm yard.
Phelim's want of dress in his merely boyish years being, in a great
measure, the national costume of some hundred thousand young
Hibernians in his rank of life, deserves a still more, particular notice.
His infancy we pass over; but from the period at which he did not enter
into small clothes, he might be seen every Sunday morning, or on some
important festival, issuing from his father's mansion, with a piece of old
cloth tied about him from the middle to the knees, leaving a pair of legs
visible, that were mottled over with characters which would, if found
on an Egyptian pillar, put an antiquary to the necessity of constructing
a new alphabet to decipher them. This, or the inverted breeches, with
his father's flannel waistcoat, or an old coat that swept the ground at
least two feet behind him, constituted his state dress. On week days he
threw off this finery, and contented himself, if the season were summer,
with