Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/189

 174 money by smuggling pottheen (illicit whiskey) from Innishowen in Donegal (formerly celebrated for its pottheen manufacture), they say in Derry 'your granny was a Dogherty who wore a tin pocket.' (Doherty a prevalent name in the neighbourhood.) For this was a favourite way of smuggling from the highlands—bringing the stuff in a tin pocket. Tom Boyle had a more ambitious plan:—he got a tinker to make a hollow figure of tin, something like the figure of his wife, who was a little woman, which Tom dressed up in his wife's clothes and placed on the pillion behind him on the horse—filled with pottheen: for in those times it was a common custom for the wife to ride behind her husband. At last a sharp-eyed policeman, seeing the man's affectionate attention so often repeated, kept on the watch, and satisfied himself at last that Tom had a tin wife. So one day, coming behind the animal he gave the poor little woman a whack of a stick which brought forth, not a screech, but a hard metallic sound, to the astonishment of everybody: and then it was all up with poor Tom and his wife.

There are current in Ireland many stories of gaugers and pottheen distillers which hardly belong to my subject, except this one, which I may claim, because it has left its name on a well-known Irish tune:—'Paddy outwitted the gauger,' also called by three other names, 'The Irishman's heart for the ladies,' 'Drops of brandy,' and Cummilum (Moore's: 'Fairest put on Awhile'). Paddy Fogarty kept a little public-house at the cross-roads in which he sold 'parliament,' i.e. legal whiskey on which the duty had been paid; but it was well known that friends could get a little drop