Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/191

 176 In Sligo if a person is sick in a house, and one of the cattle dies, they say 'a life for a life,' and the patient will recover. Mr. Kinahan says, 'This is so universal in the wilds of Sligo that Protestants and Catholics believe it alike.'

As an expression of welcome, a person says, 'We'll spread green rushes under your feet'; a memory of the time when there were neither boards nor carpets on the floors—nothing but the naked clay—in Ireland as well as in England; and in both countries, it was the custom to strew the floors of the better class of houses with rushes, which were renewed for any distinguished visitor. This was always done by the women-servants: and the custom was so general and so well understood that there was a knife of special shape for cutting the rushes. (See my 'Smaller Social Hist. of Ancient Ireland,' p. 305.)

A common exclamation of drivers for urging on a horse, heard everywhere in Ireland, is hupp, hupp! It has found its way even into our nursery rhymes; as when a mother is dancing her baby up and down on her knee, she sings:—

'How many miles to Dub-l-in? Three score and ten, Will we be there by candle light? Yes and back again: Hupp, hupp my little horse, Hupp, hupp again.'

This Irish word, insignificant as it seems, has come down from a period thirteen or fourteen hundred years ago, or probably much farther back. In the library of St. Gall in Switzerland there is a manuscript written in the eighth century by some scholarly Irish