intended. Whilst one party cut the scraws, another bound the _couples
and bauks_* and a third cut as many green branches as were sufficient to
wattle it. The couples, being bound, were raised--the ribs laid on--then
the wattles, and afterwards the scraws.

* The couples are shaped like the letter A, and sustain
the roof; the bauks, or rafters, cross them from one
side to another like the line inside the letter.

Whilst these successive processes went forward, many others had been
engaged all the morning cutting rushes; and the scraws were no sooner
laid on, than half a dozen thatchers mounted the roof, and long before
the evening was closed, a school-house, capable of holding near two
hundred children, was finished. But among the peasantry no new house is
ever put up without a hearth-warming and a dance. Accordingly the clay
floor was paired--a fiddler procured--Barny Brady and his stock
of poteen sent for; the young women of the village and surrounding
neighborhood attended in their best finery; dancing commenced--and
it was four o'clock the next morning when the merry-makers departed,
leaving Mat a new home and a hard floor, ready for the reception of his
scholars.

Business now commenced. At nine o'clock the next day Mat's furniture
was settled in a small cabin, given to him at a cheap rate by one of the
neighboring farmers; for, whilst the school-house was being built,
two men, with horses and cars, had gone to Clansallagh, accompanied
by Nancy, and removed the furniture, such as it was, to their new
residence. Nor was Mat, upon the whole, displeased at what had happened;
for he was now fixed in a flourishing country--fertile and well
cultivated; nay, the bright landscape which his school-house commanded
was sufficient in itself to reconcile him to his situation. The
inhabitants were in comparatively good circumstances; many of them
wealthy, respectable farmers, and capable of remunerating him very
decently for his literary labors; and what was equally flattering, there
was a certainty of his having a numerous and well-attended school in a
neighborhood with whose inhabitants he was acquainted.

Honest, kind-hearted Paddy!--pity that you should ever feel distress or
hunger--pity that you should be compelled to seek, in another land, the
hard-earned pittance by which you keep the humble cabin over your chaste
wife and naked children! Alas! what noble materials for composing a
national character, of