my going to Dublin
yesterday, for fear the mistress's band-box should get wet upon my
cars. But, please your honour, if your honour's displeased about it,
I'll not be waiting for a loading; I'll take my car and go to Dublin
to-morrow for the slates, if that be what your honour means. Oh, sure
I would not tell a lie for the entire price of the slates; I know very
well it didn't rain to call rain yesterday. But after twelve o'clock,
I don't say I noticed one way or other."

In this perverse and ludicrous method of beating about the bush, the
man would persist till he had fairly exhausted your patience; and all
this he would do, partly from cunning, and partly from that
apprehension of injustice which he has been taught to feel by hard
experience. The effects of the example of their parents is early and
most strikingly visible in the children of this class of people in
Ireland. The children, who are remarkably quick and intelligent, are
universally addicted to lying. We do not here scruple or hesitate in
the choice of our terms, because we are convinced that this
unqualified assertion would not shock the feelings of the parties
concerned. These poor children are not brought up to think falsehood a
disgrace; they are praised for the ingenuity with which they escape
from the cross examination of their superiors; and their capacities
are admired in proportion to the _acuteness_, or, as their parents
pronounce it, '_cuteness_, of their equivocating replies. Sometimes
(the _garcon_[53]) the little boy of the family is despatched by his
mother to the landlord's neighbouring bog or turf rick, to _bring
home_, in their phraseology, in ours to _steal_, a few turf; if, upon
this expedition, the little Spartan be detected, he is tolerably
certain of being whipped by his mother, or some of his friends, upon
his return home. "Ah, ye little brat! and what made ye tell the
gentleman when he met ye, ye rogue, that ye were going to the rick?
And what business had ye to go and belie me to his honour, ye
unnatural piece of goods! I'll teach ye to make mischief through the
country! So I will. Have ye got no better sense and manners at this
time o'day, than to behave, when one trusts ye abroad, so like an
innocent?" An innocent in Ireland, as formerly in England, (witness
the Rape of the Lock) is synonymous with a fool. "And fools and
innocents shall still believe."

The associations of pleasure, of pride and gayety, are so strong in
the m