Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/184

 CH. XI.] the supper-pot well up from the fire and delay the boiling. (Ulster.)

The following two old rhymes are very common:—

Four and twenty tailors went out to kill a snail, The biggest of them all put his foot upon his tail— The snail put out his horns just like a cow: 'O Lord says the tailor we're all killed now!'

As I was going to Dub-l-in I met a pack of tailors, I put them in my pocket, In fear the ducks might ait them.

In the Co. Down the Roman Catholics are called 'back-o'-the-hill folk': an echo of the Plantations of James I—three centuries ago—when the Catholics, driven from their rich lowland farms, which were given to the Scottish Presbyterian planters, had to eke out a living among the glens and mountains.

When a person does anything out of the common—which is not expected of him—especially anything with a look of unusual prosperity:—'It is not every day that Manus kills a bullock.' (Derry.) This saying, which is always understood to refer to Roman Catholics, is a memorial, in one flash, of the plantation of the northern districts. Manus is a common Christian name among the Catholics round Derry, who are nearly all very poor: how could they be otherwise? That Manus—i.e. a Catholic—should kill a bullock is consequently taken as a type of things very unusual, unexpected and exceptional. Maxwell, in 'Wild Sports of the West,' quotes this saying as he heard it in Mayo; but naturally enough the saying alone had reached the west without its background of history, which is not known there as it is in Derry.