Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/179

 164 perpetually boiling like the chiefs' caldrons of old, so that no one need be hungry or thirsty so long as he had a penny in his pocket. These pots were so large that they came to be spoken of as a symbol of plenty: 'Why you have as much bacon and cabbage there as would fill a tent-pot.'

One day—long long ago—at the fair of Ardpatrick in Limerick—I was then a little boy, but old enough to laugh at the story when I heard it in the fair—a fellow with a wattle in his hand having a sharp iron spike on the end, walked up to one of these tent-pots during the momentary absence of the owner, and thrusting the spike into a pig's cheek, calmly stood there holding the stick in his hand till the man came up. 'What are you doing there?'—When the other looking sheepish and frightened:—'Wisha sir I have a little bit of a pig's cheek here that isn't done well enough all out, and I was thinking that may be you wouldn't mind if I gave it a couple of biles in your pot.' 'Be off out of that you impudent blaa-guard, yourself and your pig's cheek, or I'll break every bone in your body.' The poor innocent boy said nothing, but lifted the stick out of the pot with the pig's cheek on the end of it, and putting it on his shoulder, walked off through the fair with meek resignation.

More than a thousand years ago it was usual in Ireland for ladies who went to banquets with their husbands or other near relations to wear a mask. This lady's mask was called fethal, which is the old form of the word, modern form fidil. The memory of this old custom is preserved in the name now given to a mask by both English and Irish speakers—i fiddle, eye-fiddle, hi-fiddle, or hy-fiddle (the first two