With
mud he was hand and glove, and not a bog in the parish, or a quagmire
in the neighborhood, but sprung up under Phelim's tread, and threw him
forward with the brisk vibration of an old acquaintance. Touching his
dress, however, in the early part of his life, if he was clothed with
nothing else, he was clothed with mystery. Some assert that a cast-off
pair of his father's nether garments might be seen upon him each Sunday,
the wrong side foremost, in accommodation with some economy of his
mother's, who thought it safest, in consequence of his habits, to join
them in this inverted way to a cape which he wore on his shoulders. We
ourselves have seen one, who saw another, who saw Phelim in a pair of
stockings which covered him from his knee-pans to his haunches, where,
in the absence of waistbands, they made a pause--a breach existing from
that to the small of his back. The person who saw all this affirmed, at
the same time, that there was a dearth of cloth about the skirts of
the integument which stood him instead of a coat. He bore no bad
resemblance, he said, to-a moulting fowl, with scanty feathers, running
before a gale in the farm yard.
Phelim's want of dress in his merely boyish years being, in a great
measure, the national costume of some hundred thousand young Hibernians
in his rank of life, deserves a still more, particular notice.
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