Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee: Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of; William Carleton, Volume ThreeCarleton, William
General
Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee: Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of; William Carleton, Volume Three
Carleton, William
Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
simplicity of character, his goodness of heart, and his attachment to
the wife by whose death that heart had been broken.
Such was the melancholy end of the honest and warm-hearted Peter
Connell, who, unhappily, was not a solitary instance of a man driven to
habits of intoxication and neglect of business by the force of sorrow,
which time and a well-regulated mind might otherwise have overcome. We
have held him up, on the one hand, as an example worthy of imitation
in that industry and steadiness which, under the direction of his wife,
raised him from poverty to independence and wealth; and, on the other,
as a man resorting to the use of spirituous liquors that he might
be enabled to support affliction--a course which, so far from having
sustained him under it, shattered his constitution, shortened his life,
and destroyed his happiness. In conclusion, we wish our countrymen of
Peter's class would imitate him in his better qualities, and try to
avoid his failings.
THE LIANHAN SHEE.
One summer evening Mary Sullivan was sitting at her own well-swept
hearthstone, knitting feet to a pair of sheep's gray stockings for
Bartley, her husband. It was one of those serene evenings in the
month of June, when the decline of day assumes a calmness and repose,
resembling what we might suppose to have irradiated Eden, when our first
parents sat in it before their fall. The beams of the sun shone through
the windows in clear shafts of amber light, exhibiting millions of those
atoms which float to the naked eye within its mild radiance. The dog lay
barking in his dreams at her feet, and the gray cat sat purring placidly
upon his back, from which even his occasional agitation did not dislodge
her.
Mrs. Sullivan was the wife of a wealthy farmer, and niece to the Rev.
Felix O'Rourke; her kitchen was consequently large, comfortable, and
warm. Over where she sat, jutted out the “brace” well lined with bacon;
to the right hung a well-scoured salt-box, and to the left was the jamb,
with its little gothic paneless window to admit the light. Within it
hung several ash rungs, seasoning for flail-sooples, or boulteens, a
dozen of eel-skins, and several stripes of horse-skin, as hangings for
them. The dresser was a “parfit white,” and well furnished with the
usual appurtenances. Over the door and on the “threshel,” were nailed,
“for luck,” two horse-shoes, that had been found by accident. In a
little “hole” in the wall, beneath the salt-box, lay a bottle of holy
water to keep the place purified; and against the cope-stone of the
gable, on the outside, grew a large lump of house-leek, as a specific
for sore eyes and other maladies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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