“There had not been a larger fair in the town of Knockimdowny for years.  The day was dark and sunless, but sultry.  On looking through the crowd, I could see no man! without a cudgel; yet, what was strange, there was no certainty of any sport.  Several desultory skrimmages had locality, but they I were altogether sequestered from the great factions of the O’s.  Except that it was pleasant and stirred one’s blood to look at them, or occasioned the cudgels to be grasped more firmly, there was no personal interest felt by any of us in them; they therefore began and ended, here and there, through the fair, like mere flashes in the pan, dying in their own smoke.

“The blood of every prolific nation is naturally hot; but when that hot blood is inflamed by ardent spirits, it is not to be supposed that men should be cool; and God he knows, there is not on the level surface of this habitable globe, a nation that has been so thoroughly inflamed by ardent spirits of all kinds as Ireland.

“Up till four o’clock that day, the factions were quiet.  Several relations on both sides had been invited to drink by John and Rose’s families, for the purpose of establishing a good feeling between them.  But this was, after all, hardly to be expected, for they hated one another with an ardency much too good-humored and buoyant; and, between ourselves, to bring Paddy over a bottle is a very equivocal mode of giving him an anti-cudgeling disposition.  After the hour of four, several of the factions were getting very friendly, which I knew at the time to be a bad sign.  Many of them nodded to each other, which I knew to be a worse one; and some of them shook hands with the greatest cordiality, which I no sooner saw than I slipped the knot of my cravat, and held myself in preparation for the sport.

“I have often had occasion to remark—­and few men, let me tell you, had finer opportunities of doing so—­the differential symptomatics between a Party Fight, that is, a battle between Orangemen and Ribbon-men, and one between two Roman Catholic Factions.  There is something infinitely more anxious, silent, and deadly, in the compressed vengeance, and the hope of slaughter, which characterize a party fight, than is to be seen in a battle between factions.  The truth is, the enmity is not so deep and well-grounded in the latter as in the former.  The feeling is not political nor religious between the factions; whereas, in the other, it is both, which is a mighty great advantage; for when this is adjuncted to an intense personal hatred, and a sense of wrong, probably arising from a too intimate recollection of the leaded black thorn, or the awkward death of some relative, by the musket or the bayonet, it is apt to produce very purty fighting, and much respectable retribution.