His usual practice was, when the family came home at night from their labour, to stretch himself upon two chairs, his head resting upon the hob, with a boss for a pillow, his eyes closed, as a proof that his mind was deeply engaged with the matter in hand. In this attitude he got some one to read the particular prophecy upon which he wished to descant; and a most curious and amusing entertainment it generally was to hear the text, and his own singular and original commentaries upon it. That he must have been often hoaxed by wags and wits, was quite evident from the startling travesties of the text which had been put into his mouth, and which, having been once put there, his tenacious memory never forgot. The fact of Barney’s arrival in the neighbourhood soon went abroad, and the natural consequence was, that the house in which he thought proper to reside for the time became crowded every night as soon as the hours of labour had passed, and the people got leisure to hear him. Having thus procured him an audience, it is full time that we should allow the fat old Prophet to speak for himself, and give us all an insight into futurity. “Barney, ahagur,” the good man his host would say, “here’s a lot o’ the neighbours come to hear a whirrangue from you on the Prophecies; and, sure, if you can’t give it to them, who is there to be found that can?” “Throth, Paddy Traynor, although I say it that should not say it, there’s truth in that, at all evints. The same knowledge has cost me many a weary blisthur an’ sore heel in huntin’ it up an’ down, through mountain an’ glen, in Ulsther, Munsther, Leinsther, an’ Connaught--not forgettin’ the Highlands of Scotland, where there’s what they call the ‘short prophecy,’ or second sight, but wherein there’s afther all but little of the Irish or long prophecy, that regards what’s to befall the winged woman that flown into the wilderness. No, no--their second sight isn’t thrue prophecy at all. If a man goes out to fish, or steal a cow, an’ that he happens to be drowned or shot, another man that has the second sight will see this in his mind about or afther the time it happens. Why, that’s little. Many a time our own Irish drames are aiqual to it; an’ indeed I have it from a knowledgeable man, that the gift they boast of has four parents--an empty stomach, thin air, a weak head, an’ strong whisky, an’ that a man must have all these, espishilly the last, before he can have the second sight properly; an’ it’s my own opinion. Now, I have a little book (indeed I left my books with a friend down at Errigle) that contains a prophecy of the milk-white hind an’ the bloody panther, an’ a forebodin’ of the slaughter there’s to be in the Valley of the Black Pig, as foretould by Beal Derg, or the prophet wid the red mouth, who never was known to speak but when he prophesied, or to prophesy but when he spoke.” “The Lord bless an’ keep us!--an’ why was he called the Man wid the Red Mouth, Barney?”