* Excommunicate.  It is generally pronounced as above by the people.

“‘Well, well, your Reverence,’ says my father-in-law, ’let all by-gones be by-gones; and please God, they will, before they go, be better friends than ever they were.  Go now an’ clane yourselves, take the blood from about your faces, for the dinner’s ready an hour agone; but if you all respect the place you’re in, you’ll show it, in regard of the young crathurs that’s going, in the name of God, to face the world together, and of coorse wishes that this day at laste should pass in pace and quietness:  little did I think there was any friend or neighbor here that would make so little of the place or people, as was done for nothing at all, in the face of the country.’

“‘God he sees,’ says my mother-in-law, ’that there’s them here this day we didn’t desarve this from, to rise such a norration, as if the house was a shebeen or a public-house!  It’s myself didn’t think either me or my poor coolleen here, not to mention the dacent people she’s joined to, would be made so little of, as to have our place turned into a play-acthur—­for a play-acthur couldn’t be worse.’

“‘Well,’ says my uncle, ’there’s no help for spilt milk, I tell you, nor for spilt blood either; tare-an-ounty, sure we’re all Irishmen, relations, and Catholics through other, and we oughtn’t to be this way.  Come away to the dinner—­by the powers, we’ll duck the first man that says a loud word for the remainder of the day.  Come, Father Corrigan, and carve the goose, or the geese, for us—­for, by my sannies, I bleeve there’s a baker’s dozen of them; but we’ve plenty of Latin for them, and your Reverence and Father James here understands that langidge, any how—­larned enough there, I think, gintlemen.’

“‘That’s right, Brian,’ shouts the tailor—­’that’s right; there must be no fighting:  by the powers, the first man attempts it, I’ll brain him—­fell him to the earth like an ox, if all belonging to him was in my way.’

“This threat from the tailor went farther, I think, in putting them into good humor nor even what the priest said.  They then washed and claned themselves, and accordingly went to their dinners.—­Billy himself marched with his terrible whip in his hand, and his long cavalry spurs sticking near ten inches behind him, draggled to the tail like a bantling cock after a shower.  But, maybe, there was more draggled tails and bloody noses nor poor Billy’s, or even nor was occasioned by the fight; for after Father Corrigan had come, several of them dodged up, some with broken shins and heads and wet clothes, that they’d got on the way by the mischances of the race, particularly at the Flush.  But I don’t know how it was; somehow the people in them days didn’t value these things a straw.  They were far hardier then nor they are now, and never went to law at all at all.  Why, I’ve often known skulls to be broken, and the people to die afterwards, and there