| ‘Miss Catherine O’Donnell’, our Landlady, now baked a loaf for us of ½ barley ½ Indian meal, the oven being a metal pot, set in a turf fire. We soon dispatched the said loaf, with the Oysters we had gathered and tea of our own manufacture, and then returning to our respective corners of the room, we sunk into the arms of ‘Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep’, which unlike the world ‘A ready visit paid’, though fortune didn’t ‘smile’, as the Poet says, at first to secure the above consummation, ‘So devoutly to be wished’ / Sleeping in a cottage in such a wild district, swarming with semi-amphibious, semi-barbarous Celts, with boltless door, and not even a spare chair to secure it with, – we, as a consequence, lay in a dreamy, watchful state, – and imagine our sensations, when almost simultaneously, at the dead hour of night, we felt ourselves suddenly seized hold of in various parts of the body at the same moment, without the power of resistance! For several minutes before awakening to actual consciousness, a sensation of uneasiness had crept over me, but not being undressed, and only encumbered with our plaids and mackintoshes, we imagined if not secure from molestation, we were at all events, ready for resistance: but the stealthiness of the bloodthirsty Irish Flea had received so great a stimulus from recent privations, that we were pounced upon and made a glorious meal of before we could turn upon our enemies, – and in vain we said, or sung: – ‘What ails these fleas they bite me so, / I never did them wrong!’/ The stipendiary Magistrate comes here periodically, and this is where he sleeps by night, and holds his court by day! It is fortunate these cannibalized companions of the Celt, do not prevent the incursions of Justice into their dominions; but I feel they will long be a barrier to fraternity with the Saxon. [pp. 27-29] |
