“The amusements of the females are also nearly such as I have drafted out.  Nosegays of the darlings might be seen sated on green banks, or sauntering about with a sly intention of coming in compact with their sweethearts, or, like bachelors’ buttons in smiling rows, criticising the young men as they pass.  Others of them might be seen screened behind a hedge, with their backs to the spectators taking the papers off their curls before small bit of looking-glass placed against the ditch; or perhaps putting on their shoes and stockings—­which phrase can be used only by the authority of the figure heusteron proteron—­inasmuch as if they put on the shoes first, you persave, it would be a scientific job to get on the stockings after; but it’s an idiomatioal expression, and therefore justifiable.  However, it’s a general custom in the country, which I dare to say has not yet spread into large cities, for the young women to walk bare-footed to the chapel, or within a short distance of it, that they may exhibit their bleached thread stockings and well-greased slippers to the best advantage, not pretermitting a well-turned ankle and neat leg, which, I may fearlessly assert, my fair country-women can show against any other nation, living or dead.

“One sunny Sabbath, the congregation of Knockimdowny were thus assimilated, amusing themselves in the manner I have just outlined; a series of country girls sat on a little green mount, called the Rabbit Bank, from the circumstance of its having been formerly an open burrow, though of late years it has been closed.  It was near twelve o’clock, the hour at which Father Luke O’Shaughran was generally seen topping the rise of the hill at Larry Mulligan’s public-house, jogging on his bay hack at something between a walk and a trot—­that is to say, his horse moved his fore and hind legs on the off side at one motion, and the fore and hind legs of the near side in another, going at a kind of dog’s trot, like the pace of an idiot with sore feet in a shower—­a pace, indeed, to which the animal had been set for the last sixteen years, but beyond which, no force, or entreaty, or science, or power, either divine or human, of his Reverence could drive him.  As yet, however, he had not become apparent; and the girls already mentioned were discussing the pretensions which several of their acquaintances had to dress or beauty.

“‘Peggy,’ said Katy Carroll to her companion, Peggy Donohue, ’were you out* last Sunday?’

     * Out.—­This expression in remote parts of the country is
     understood to mean being at mass.

“’No, in troth, Katty, I was disappointed in getting my shoes from Paddy Mellon, though I left him the measure for my foot three weeks agone, and gave him a thousand warnings to make them duck-nebs; but, instead of that,’ said she, holding out a very purty foot, ’he has made them as sharp in the toe as a pick-axe, and a full mile too short for me.  But why do ye ax was I out, Katty?’