English As We Speak It in Ireland

by P. W. Joyce

A man is deeply injured by another and threatens reprisal:—'I'll make you smell hell for that'; a bitter threat which may be paraphrased: I'll persecute you to death's door; and for you to be near death is to be near hell—I'll put you so near that you'll smell the fumes of the brimstone.

A usual imprecation when a person who has made himself very unpopular is going away: 'the devil go with him.' One day a fellow was eating his dinner of dry potatoes, and had only one egg half raw for kitchen. He had no spoon, and took the egg in little sips intending to spread it over the dinner. But one time he tilted the shell too much, and down went the whole contents. After recovering from the gulp, he looked ruefully at the empty shell and blurted out—the devil go with you down!

Many people think—and say it too—that it is an article of belief with Catholics that all Protestants when they die go straight to hell—which is a libel. Yet it is often kept up in joke, as in this and other

stories:—The train was skelping away like mad along the main line to hell—for they have railways there now—till at last it pulled up at the junction. Whereupon the porters ran round shouting out, 'Catholics change here for purgatory: Protestants keep your places!'

This reminds us of Father O'Leary, a Cork priest of the end of the eighteenth century, celebrated as a controversialist and a wit. He was one day engaged in gentle controversy—or argufying religion as we call it in Ireland—with a Protestant friend, who plainly had the worst of the encounter. 'Well now Father O'Leary I want to ask what have you to say about purgatory?' 'Oh nothing,' replied the priest, 'except that you might go farther and fare worse.'

The same Father O'Leary once met in the streets a friend, a witty Protestant clergyman with whom he had many an encounter of wit and repartee. 'Ah Father O'Leary, have you heard the bad news?' 'No,' says Father O'Leary. 'Well, the bottom has fallen out of purgatory, and all the poor Papists have gone down into hell.' 'Oh the Lord save us,' answered Father O'Leary, 'what a crushing the poor Protestants must have got!'

Father O'Leary and Curran—the great orator and wit—sat side by side once at a dinner party, where Curran was charmed with his reverend friend. 'Ah Father O'Leary,' he exclaimed at last, 'I wish you had the key of heaven.' 'Well Curran it might be better for you that I had the key of the other place.'

A parish priest only recently dead, a well-known wit, sat beside a venerable Protestant clergyman at

dinner; and they got on very agreeably. This clergyman rather ostentatiously proclaimed his liberality by saying:—'Well Father —— I have been for sixty years in this world and I could never understand that there is any great and essential difference between the Catholic religion and the Protestant.' 'I can tell you,' replied Father ——, 'that when you die you'll not be sixty minutes in the other world before you will understand it perfectly.'

The preceding are all in joke: but I once heard the idea enunciated in downright earnest. In my early life, we, the village people, were a mixed community, about half and half Catholics and Protestants, the latter nearly all Palatines, who were Methodists to a man. We got on very well together, and I have very kindly memories of my old playfellows, Palatines as well as Catholics.