Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/121

 106 But the hand was only half way when a stray bullet whizzed by and knocked off the cap without doing any injury. Whereupon Paddy, perfectly unmoved, stooped down, replaced the cap and completed the salute. The officer, admiring his coolness, said ‘That was a narrow shave my man!’ ‘Yes your honour: an inch is as good as a mile.’ This is one of our commonest sayings.

A person is reproved for some trifling harmless liberty, and replies:—'Oh a cat can look at a king.' (A translation from Irish.)

A person who fails to get what he was striving after is often glad to accept something very inferior: 'When all fruit fails welcome haws.'

When a person shows no sign of gratitude for a good turn as if it passed completely from his memory, people say 'Eaten bread is soon forgotten.'

A person is sent upon some dangerous mission, as when the persons he is going to are his deadly enemies:—that is 'Sending the goose on a message to the fox's den.'

If a dishonest avaricious man is put in a position of authority over people from whom he has the power to extort money; that is 'putting the fox to mind the geese.'

'You have as many kinds of potatoes on the table as if you took them from a beggarman's bag': referring to the good old time when beggarmen went about and usually got a lyre of potatoes in each house.

'No one can tell what he is able to do till he tries,' as the duck said when she swallowed a dead kitten.