n
our readers are informed that all this bloodshed arose from their
unwillingness to lose a shilling by remaining in Liverpool another
night? Or who could believe that these very men, on reaching home, and
meeting their friends in a fair or market, or in a public-house after
mass on a Sunday, would sit down and spend, recklessly and foolishly,
that very money which in another country they part with as if it were
their very heart's blood? Yet so it is! Unfortunately, Paddy is wiser
anywhere than at home, where wisdom, sobriety, and industry are best
calculated to promote his own interests.

This slight sketch of Phil Purcel we have presented to our readers as
a specimen of the low, cunning Connaught-man; and we have only to add,
that neither the pig-selling scene, nor the battle on the deck of the
vessel in Liverpool, is fictitious. On the contrary, we have purposely
kept the tone of our description of the latter circumstance beneath the
reality. Phil, however, is not drawn as a general portrait, but as
one of that knavish class of men called "jobbers," a description
of swindlers certainly not more common in Ireland than in any other
country. We have known Connaughtmen as honest and honorable as it was
possible to be; yet there is a strong prejudice entertained against
them in every other province of Ireland, as is evident by the old adage,
"Never trust a Connaugtaman."

THE GEOGRAPHY OF AN IRISH OATH.

No pen can do justice to the extravagance and frolic inseparable from
the character of of the Irish people; nor has any system of philosophy
been discovered that can with moral fitness be applied to them.
Phrenology fails to explain it; for, so far as the craniums of Irishmen
are concerned, according to the most capital surveys hitherto made and
reported on, it appears that, inasmuch as their moral and intellectual
organs predominate over the physical and sensual, the people ought,
therefore, to be ranked at the very tip-top of morality. We would warn
the phrenologists, however, not to be too sanguine in drawing inferences
from an examination of Paddy's head. Heaven only knows the scenes in
which it is engaged, and the protuberances created by a long life of
hard fighting. Many an organ and development is brought out on it by the
cudgel, that never would have appeared had Nature been left to herself.

Drinking, fighting, and swearing, are the three great characteristics
of every people. Paddy's love of fig