The Ned M'Keown Stories: Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of; William Carleton, Volume ThreeCarleton, William
General
The Ned M'Keown Stories: Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of; William Carleton, Volume Three
Carleton, William
Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
“It's a thrue saying, that as the ould cock crows the young one larns;
and this was thrue here, for the childher fought one another like so
many divils, and swore like Trojans--Larry, along with everything else,
when he was a Brine-oge, thought it was a manly thing to be a great
swearer; and the childher, when they got able to swear, warn't worse nor
their father. At first, when any of the little souls would thry at an
oath, Larry would break his heart laughing at them; and so, from one
thing to another, they got quite hardened in it, without being any way
checked in wickedness. Things at last drew on to a bad state, entirely.
Larry and Sally were now as ragged as Dives and Lazarus, and their
childher the same. It was no strange sight, in summer, to see the young
ones marching about the street as bare as my hand, with scarce a blessed
stitch upon them that ever was seen, they dirt and ashes to the eyes,
waddling after their uncle Tom's geese and ducks, through the green
sink of rotten water that lay before their own door, just beside the
dunghill: or the bigger ones running after the Squire's laborers, when
bringing home the corn or the hay, wanting to get a ride as they went
back with the empty cars.
“Larry and Sally would never be let into the Squire's kitchen now to eat
or drink, or spend an evening with the sarvints; he might go out and in
to his meal's mate along with the rest of the laborers, but there was
no _grah_ (* goodwill) for him. Sally would go down with her jug to get
some buttermilk, and have to stand among a set of beggars and cotters,
she as ragged and as poor as any of them, for she wouldn't be let into
the kitchen till her turn came, no more nor another, for the sarvints
would turn up their noses with the greatest disdain possible at them
both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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