nothing else, he was clothed with mystery. Some assert that a cast-off
pair of his father's nether garments might be seen upon him each Sunday,
the wrong side foremost, in accommodation with some economy of his
mother's, who thought it safest, in consequence of his habits, to join
them in this inverted way to a cape which he wore on his shoulders. We
ourselves have seen one, who saw another, who saw Phelim in a pair of
stockings which covered him from his knee-pans to his haunches, where,
in the absence of waistbands, they made a pause--a breach existing from
that to the small of his back. The person who saw all this affirmed, at
the same time, that there was a dearth of cloth about the skirts of
the integument which stood him instead of a coat. He bore no bad
resemblance, he said, to-a moulting fowl, with scanty feathers, running
before a gale in the farm yard.

Phelim's want of dress in his merely boyish years being, in a great
measure, the national costume of some hundred thousand young Hibernians
in his rank of life, deserves a still more, particular notice. His
infancy we pass over; but from the period at which he did not enter
into small clothes, he might be seen every Sunday morning, or on some
important festival, issuing from his father's mansion, with a piece of
old cloth tied about him from the middle to the knees, leaving a pair
of legs visible, that were mottled over with characters which would,
if found on an Egyptian pillar, put an antiquary to the necessity of
constructing a new alphabet to decipher them. This, or the inverted
breeches, with his father's flannel waistcoat, or an old coat that swept
the ground at least two feet behind him, constituted his state dress. On
week days he threw off this finery, and contented himself, if the season
were summer, with appearing in a dun-colored shirt, which resembled
a noun-substantive, for it could stand alone. The absence of soap and
water is sometimes used as a substitute for milling linen among the