willing to let them try the engagement out, that they might see what
side could boast of having the best man. They began where you enter the
north side of Knockimdowny, and fought successively up to the other end,
then back again to the spot where they commenced, and afterwards up to
the middle of the town, right opposite to the market-place, where my
grandfather, by the same a-token, lost a grinder; but he soon took
satisfaction for that, by giving Mucldemurray a tip above the eye with
the end of an oak stick, dacently loaded with lead, which made the poor
man feel very quare entirely, for the few days that he survived it.

* Literally the stroke of a cudgel; put for cudgel-player.

"Faith, if an Irishman happened to be born in Scotland, he would find it
mighty inconvanient--afther losing two or three grinders in a row--to
manage the hard oaten bread that they use there; for which rason, God be
good to his sowl that first invented the phaties, anyhow, because a
man can masticate them without a tooth, at all at all. I'll engage,
if larned books were consulted, it would be found out that he was
an Irishman. I wonder that neither Pastorini nor Columbkill mentions
anything about him in their prophecies concerning the church; for my own
part, I'm strongly inclinated to believe that it must have been Saint
Patrick himself; and I think that his driving all kinds of venomous
reptiles out of the kingdom is, according to the Socrastic method of
argument, an undeniable proof of it. The subject, to a dead certainty,
is not touched upon in the Brehon Code,* nor by any of the three
Psalters,** which is extremely odd, seeing that the earth never produced
a root equal to it in the multiplying force of prolification. It is,
indeed, the root of prosperity to a fighting people: and many a time my
grandfather boasts to this day, that the first bit of bread he ever ett
was a phatie.

* This was the old code of laws peculiar to Ireland before
the introduction of English legislation into it.

** There was properly only two Psalters, those of Tara and
Cashel. The Psalters were collections of genealogical
history, partly in verse; from which latter circumstances
they had their name.

"In mentioning my grandfather's fight with Mucldemurray, I happened to
name them blackguards, the O'Hallaghans: hard fortune to the same
set, for they have no more discretion in their quarrels, than so many
Egyptian mummie