Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/213

 198 child, long before Charles Kickham wrote 'Knocknagow,' in which he tells the story too: but I will give it in his words. A station is held at Maurice Kearney's, where the family and servants and the neighbours go to Confession and receive Holy Communion: among the rest Barney Broderick the stable boy. After all was over, Father MacMahon's driver provokes and insults Barney, who is kept back, and keeps himself back with difficulty from falling on him and 'knocking his two eyes into one' and afterwards 'breaking every tooth in his head.' 'Damn well the blagard knows,' exclaims Barney, 'that I'm in a state of grace to-day. But'—he continued, shaking his fist at the fellow—'but, please God I won't be in a state of grace always.'

When a person is smooth-tongued, meek-looking, over civil, and deceitful, he is plauzy [plausible], 'as mild as ever on stirabout smiled.' 'Oh she is sly enough; she looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.' (Charles Macklin—an Irish writer—in The Man of the World.) This last expression of Macklin's is heard everywhere here.

A person is in some sore fix, or there is trouble before him: 'I wouldn't like to be in his shoes just now.'

A person falls in for some piece of good fortune:—'Oh you're made up, John: you're a med man; you're on the pig's back now.'

In a house where the wife is master—the husband henpecked:—'the grey mare is the better horse.' (General.)

He got the father of a beating; i.e. a great beating.