Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush Read Online Free Page A

possible for the things of to-day, and to take no thought at all for the morrow.
    “Shure, Ma’am, it can be used,” said an Irish girl to me, after breaking the spout out of an expensive china jug, “It is not a hair the worse!” She could not imagine that a mutilated object could occasion the least discomfort to those accustomed to order and neatness in their household arrangements.
    The Irish female servants are remarkably chaste in their language and deportment. You are often obliged to find fault with them for gross acts of neglect and wastefulness, but never for using bad language. They may spoil your children by over-indulgence, but they never corrupt their morals by loose conversation.
    An Irish girl once told me, with beautiful simplicity, “that every bad word a woman uttered, made the blessed Virgin
blush.”
    A girl becoming a mother before marriage is regarded as a dreadful calamity by her family, and she seldom, if ever, gets one of her own countrymen to marry her with this stain on her character.
    How different is the conduct of the female peasantry in the eastern counties of England, who unblushingly avow their derelictions from the paths of virtue. The crime of infanticide, so common there, is almost unknown among the Irish. If the priest and the confessional are able to restrain the lower ordersfrom the commission of gross crime, who shall say that they are without their use? It is true that the priest often exercises his power over his flock in a manner which would appear to a Protestant to border on the ludicrous.
    A girl who lived with a lady of my acquaintance, gave the following graphic account of an exhortation delivered by the priest at the altar. I give it in her own words: –
    “Shure, Ma’am, we got a great scould from the praste the day.” “Indeed, Biddy, what did he scold you for?” “Faix, and it’s not meself that he scoulded at all, at all, but Misther Peter N—and John L—, an’ he held them up as an example to the whole church. ‘Peter N—’ says he, ‘you have not been inside this church before to-day for the last three months, and you have not paid your pew-rent for the last two years. But, maybe, you have got the fourteen dollars in your pocket at this moment of spaking; or maybe you have spint it in buying pig-iron to make gridirons, in order to fry your mate of a Friday; and when your praste comes to visit you, if he does not see it itself, he smells it. And you, John L—, Alderman L—, are not six days enough in the week for work and pastime, that you must go hunting of hares on a holiday? And pray how many hares did you catch, Alderman John?’“
    The point of the last satire lay in the fact that the said Alderman John was known to be an ambitious, but very poor, sportsman; which made the allusion to the
hares
he had shot the unkindest cut of all.
    Such an oration from a Protestant minister would have led his congregation to imagine that their good pastor had lost his wits; but I have no doubt that it was eminently successful in abstracting the fourteen dollars from the pocket of the dilatory Peter N—, and in preventing Alderman John from hunting hares on a holiday for the time to come.
    Most of the Irish priests possess a great deal of humour, which always finds a response in their mirth-loving countrymen, to whom wit is a quality of native growth.
    “I wish you a happy death, Pat S—” said Mr. R—, the jolly, black-browed priest of P—, after he had married an old servant of ours, who had reached the patriarchal age of sixty-eight, to an old woman of seventy.
    “D—clear of it!” quoth Pat, smiting his thigh, with a look of inimitable drollery, – such a look of broad humour as can alone twinkle from the eyes of an emeralder of that class. Pat was a prophet; in less than six months he brought the body of the youthful bride in a waggon to the house of the said priest to be buried, and, for aught I know to the contrary, the old man is living still,