now flocked with such exuberant spirits. Bells were ringing, drums were
beating, fifes were playing in the town, and horns sounding in every
direction, both in town and country. The people were apparelled in their
best costume, and many of them in that equivocal description of it
which could scarcely be termed costume at all. Bareheaded and barefooted
multitudes of both sexes were present, regardless of appearances, half
mad with delight, and exhibiting many a frolic and gambol considerably
at variance with the etiquette of fashionable life, although we question
whether the most fashionable fete, of them all ever produced half so
much happiness. Farmers had come from a distance in the country, mounted
upon lank horses ornamented with incrusted hips, and caparisoned with
long-straw back-suggauns that reached from the shoulders to the tail,
under which ran a crupper of the same material, designed, in addition to
a hay girth, to keep this primitive riding gear firm upon the animal's
back. Behind the farmer, generally sat either a wife or a daughter,
remarkable for their scarlet cloaks and blue petticoats; sometimes with
shoes and stockings, and very often without them. Among those assembled,
we cannot omit to mention a pretty numerous sprinkling of that class
of strollers, vagabonds, and impostors with which the country, at the
period of our tale, was overrun. Fortune-tellers, of both sexes, quacks,
cardcutters, herbalists, cow-doctors, whisperers, with a long list
of such cheats, were at the time a prevailing nuisance throughout the
kingdom; nor was there a fair proportion of them wanting here. That,
however, which filled the people with the most especial curiosity,
awe, and interest, was the general report that nothing less than a live
conjurer, who had come to town on that very evening, was then
among them. The town, in fact, was crowded as if it had been for an
illumination; but as illuminations, unless they could be conducted with
rushlights, were pageants altogether unknown in such small remote towns
as Rathfillan, the notion of one had never entered their heads. All