"Old Irish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... skies, when the world is old, and the sun burned out, and time grows weary, I shall love you still, always and forever. What is it all about, love?" He clasped her close, and did not answer at once. "Don't you know that old Irish troth," he said, "which would have been enough, even in that hard, unromantic world of ours, to have made you legally my wife, if said over any Scottish stream? I thought you knew; you are sure I would not trick you? You know I could not?" ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... out his hand impulsively. She placed hers in it. He raised it to his lips, bending low as if it had been the lily white hand of the fairest lady in the land, instead of the fat, rough, red hand of an old Irish washer-woman. ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... up the mountain slope in a bell-like soprano. Why should a bell-like soprano call the name of the old Irish king in this remote wilderness? Was there witchery at work? Was the bear merely a part of the phantasmagoria ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... jewels that were purely Irish. These were in danger of being lost to the world, or of being malformed, or stolen from their rightful owners, by strangers who could discover their value. These jewels were the old Irish airs—those exquisite fabrics which Moore raised into matchless beauty in his delicious melodies. This was his great work. He preserved the music of his nation and made it imperishable. It can never be lost again till English ceases to be spoken. He struck it out like a golden coin, with Erin's ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... development of decorative symbolic art, known as Celtic, of which we have examples on old Irish crosses, and particularly on illuminated MSS. was wrought by the Christian monks of the 7th and 8th centuries, but what is generally understood as Christian symbolic art had its finest development about the 13th century. Gothic art is essentially symbolic and in ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... is a very edifying story told by O'Curry of the effect produced on Moore, the poet, who had undertaken to write the history of Ireland (a task for which he was quite unfit), by the contemplation of an old Irish manuscript. Moore had, without knowing anything about them, spoken slightingly of the value to the historian of Ireland of the materials afforded by such ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... stampede, after the loud "One—two—three—and away!" The plunges, the waddles, the skelter of flying heels! One might have thought the gold of Klondyke was hidden in the kitchen garden. I laughed, and laughed, in a good old Irish paroxysm of merriment, until the tears rolled down my cheeks. Mr Maplestone stared, turned on his heel, ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the rest, at their grand Templemore; I had never so many in my whole life before. One has just left me, a gentleman who lives at a distance across the bog; he comes to talk with me about Greek, and the Odyssey, for he is a very learned man, and understands the old Irish and various other strange languages. He has had a dispute with Bagg. On hearing his name, he called him to him, and, after looking at him for some time with great curiosity, said that he was sure he was a Dane. Bagg, however, took the compliment in dudgeon, and said that ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... word you have hit it,' replied he, laughing; 'but you have accompanied the discovery with a look of horror more tragic than appropriate. He is not the monster you take him for—he has a good deal of old Irish pride; his temper is hasty, and he has been unfortunately thrown in the way of men who have not made allowance for these things. I am convinced that in every case in which Fitzgerald has fought, if the truth could be discovered, he would be found to have acted throughout upon ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the scene of his London ghost story in Ireland. Steadying himself in his seat with both hands, and with a tongue rather too thick to articulate clearly, he introduced us to his ancestors for twenty generations back. It was a famous old Irish family, and among the collateral branches were the O'Tooles, O'Rourkes, and O'Flahertys. They had in them the blood of the Irish kings, and accomplished marvelous feats in the wars of those times. And so we staggered with the Captain from Dublin ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... little foot God sends a little shoe," I told him, remembering the aphorism of my old Irish nurse. "And the sooner you get me home, Dinky-Dunk, the happier I'll be. For I'm tired of this place and the smell of the formalin and ether and I'm nearly worried to death about Dinkie. And in all the wide world, O Kaikobad, there's no ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Like the old Irish post-horse, the difficulty and danger of our "kettle" consisted in starting it: two tubes at once burst, and a new hole yawned in the boiler; moreover, our anchor had been thrown out in a depth of seventy-three feet. Enfin! At nine a.m. (February 3rd) we stood straight for the Sinaitic ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... with a lady and two tiny boys—Cecilia recognized them as having been passengers on their train. With them came an old Irish priest, who had met them, and the officer left them in his care while he also went off on the luggage quest. The small boys were apparently untired by their journey; they immediately began to use ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... much hard work about it for him. He soon gives up trying it at all, and prefers to eke out an uncertain existence by sponging upon good-natured old Irish women and generous but weak-minded young artisans who have left their native village to follow him and enjoy the advantage of his company ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... Feemy, was about twenty; she was a tall, dark girl, with that bold, upright, well-poised figure, which is so peculiarly Irish. She walked as if all the blood of the old Irish Princes was in her veins: her step, at any rate, was princely. Feemy, also, had large, bright brown eyes, and long, soft, shining dark hair, which was divided behind, and fell over her shoulders, or was tied with ribands; ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... Character Sketch of the young and rather raw German Waiter, is excellent; the Waiter being "raw," is not overdone. Not a dull second in the farce. Will our B.C. Author give us some of his adaptations from PLAUTUS, TERENCE (some good old Irish plots of course, in the writings of this author), and a few other ancients with whom he was, it is most probable, personally and intimately acquainted. To think that the Wandering Jew, who can only sign himself "A.D.", is "not in it" in point of time ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... common superstition (cf. Idyl xii. 24) that perjurers and liars were punished by pimples and blotches. The old Irish held that blotches showed themselves on the faces of Brehons ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... An old Irish apple-woman used to come into the barracks, and sit by the side of the parade ground with two baskets of apples ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... evening always seemed like a fevered dream to her. Her body was crowded by people but her soul was alone in a torture-chamber of its own. Yet she played steadily for the drills and gave her readings without faltering. She even put on a grotesque old Irish woman's costume and acted the part in the dialogue which Miranda Pryor had not taken. But she did not give her "brogue" the inimitable twist she had given it in the practices, and her readings lacked their usual fire and appeal. As she stood before the audience she saw one face ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to be stated that the one prefixed to the life of St. Fiech has been an heirloom in the family of Counsellor Shechan, of this city, and is taken from an old Irish prayer-book, supposed to be between three and five hundred years old. The frontispiece and the illustration fronting the Tripartite Life are taken from the Spicelegium, were engraved by Messengham, with the approbation of the French King ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... the bride's family connections, in which the biographer touched upon the accident of sex that had deprived her of the hereditary honours; the ancient descent of the Gavericks, with a picture of the old Irish castle where Lady Bridget had been brought up—and so forth, and so forth. Mrs Gildea sighed as she read, and pictured in her imagination the wild wastes of the Never-Never Land and the rough head-station which was to be Lady ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... birth in particular, I was considered gentlemanly. I had acquired that outward polish which a university education gives; I was also good-looking. With my money, good looks, and education, I was considered a match for the proud and very poor daughter of an old Irish baronet. She had no money; she had nothing but her beautiful face, her high and honorable spirit, her blue blood. You will say, 'Enough!' Ay, it was more than enough. She made me the best, the ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... Bibliotheca;" "Palingenius;" "Apuleius;" and every classical author of antiquity. As he was then employed in his curious history of the Druids, of which only a specimen is preserved, we may trace his researches in the following books: "Luydii Archaeologia Britannica;" "Old Irish Testament," &c.; "Maccurtin's History of Ireland;" "O'Flaherty's Ogygia;" "Epistolarum Hibernicarum;" "Usher's Religion of the ancient Irish;" "Brand's Isles of Orkney and Zetland;" "Pezron's ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... little eccentricities, it was hard to believe her not endued with animal vitality. She walked the railway like a thing of life. She ducked and dived and plunged and snorted and reared and jibbed like a veritable cocktailed nag of the true old Irish breed. Sometimes she seemed to go from under you as she suddenly dipped into a slight depression. Sometimes she rolled like a ship at sea, and you began to wonder if sea-sickness were possible on land. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... An old Irish woman voiced the Home Rule sentiment abroad thus: "The English have not used the Irish right, but we will forget that for the moment, for we will never be able to lift our heads again in New York if we let ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... elm, chestnut and beech, and a high hawthorn hedge just whitening into blossom. The field-path came out on this highroad, down which she had to walk a few hundred yards to her own gate. Day after day there was an old Irish labourer, a stonebreaker, by the wayside, kneeling on a sack beside a great heap of stones, who gave her a cheery good-morrow as she passed. Once she went across the road and spoke to him. He had the face of a saint at ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... "Them's the old Irish breed," said Robert, as the yellow horse voluntarily stopped short to avoid stepping on one of them; "there's no better. That Gaylass there would take a line up Patrick Street on a fair day, and you'd live and die seeing her ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... memory he, amongst other instances of generosity, erected a handsome marble stone in the church of Castle Rackrent, setting forth in large letters his age, birth, parentage, and many other virtues, concluding with the compliment so justly due, that "Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality." ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... from that compassionate feeling which is an amiable characteristic of his nature, wrote The Exile of Erin, from the impression their situation and circumstances made upon his mind. It was set to an old Irish air, of the most touching pathos, and will perish only with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 407, December 24, 1829. • Various
... bade the prisoner good-bye it was with a phrase of the old Irish vernacular. "God save ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Cincinnati early in the evening, and drove at once to his home. An old Irish servitor met him ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Danish and English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at Oxford Harold Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040. The place indeed was fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King Algar, left her curse on it. Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden by their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May morning, or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl's wings in the dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... to play, And another tune straightway Sang the kettle, louder, louder, till its voice grew very big; And the feet of laughing girls (Girls with shamrock in their curls) You could almost hear a-keeping time to that old Irish jig. ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... anywan's comin' first." As he looked around the room and outside the door to detect the advent of an intruder Peg sat at the piano and played very softly the prelude to an old Irish song. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... Fergus O'Conor and he always said he was descended from the real old Irish Kings, and he was some kind of a Fenian. I mean he used to go on something terrible against the English, and say he would never rest till they were drove out of Ireland. When he got well again he was that ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... that in this summer my father had at last borne witness that he wished to become a Christian altogether, and so it had come to pass that he and Owen and I used to ride to Bosham, the little seacoast village beyond Chichester town, to speak with Dicul, the good old Irish priest, who yet bided there rather than in the new monastery which Wilfrith built at Selsea, until we were taught all that was needful, and the time came ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... narrow, dogmatic and self-centered in any field were likely to be the butt of his humor, and he could imitate so many phases of character so cleverly that he was the life of any idle pleasure-seeking party anywhere. To this day I recall his characterization of an old Irish washerwoman arguing; a stout, truculent German laying down the law; lean, gloomy, out-at-elbows actors of the Hamlet or classic school complaining of their fate; the stingy skinflint haggling over a dollar, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... opponent before battling with what is evil. So Maeve, the ancient Queen of Connacht, looking over the walls of her city of Cruachan at the Ulster foemen, said of them, "Noble and regal is their appearance," and her own followers said, "Noble and regal are those of whom you speak." When we lost the old Irish culture we lost the tradition of courtesy to each other which lessens the difficulties of life and makes it possible to conduct ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... from the Gaelic, and are charming examples of the naive beauty of the old Irish, and of Dr. Hyde's accurate and sympathetic modern rendering. From "Beside the Fire" ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... keep the town awake, and the old Irish adage of "Where McGinty sits is the head of the table," became true of A. T. Stewart. His store was the center of trade. When he moved, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... among good men was the endowment, by the State, of Maynooth College, which is absolutely under the control of the Roman Catholic priesthood, and intended to educate their Divinity students in the Roman Catholic faith. The endowment dated from the period of the old Irish Protestant Parliament; and when, on the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, it came to an end, it was replaced by a large capital grant from the Irish Church Fund, and it is upon the interest of that grant that the College is still ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... before the other Ministers came; spent a half hour there; and prayed with the family. About three months after, the Ministers held another prayer-meeting there, Mr. Mather being present. He further stated that Mr. Mather never, in any way, suggested his prosecuting the old Irish woman for bewitching his children, nor gave him any advice in reference to the legal proceedings against her; but that "the motion of going to the authority was made to him by a Minister of ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... remember what your old Irish mother said to you when you left Old Erin to seek your fortune in the new world? She said: 'Mike, me boy, don't soil your hands with ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... reduced the character of James the First to contempt among general readers; while the narrative of historians, who have related facts in spite of themselves, is in perpetual contradiction with their own opinions. Perhaps no sovereign has suffered more by that art, which is described by an old Irish proverb, of "killing a man by lies." The surmises and the insinuations of one party, dissatisfied with the established government in church and state; the misconceptions of more modern writers, who have not possessed the requisite knowledge; and the anonymous libels, sent forth at a particular ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... regretted it; and that he never had a chance of being aught else. His father and mother had died when he was a child. He had been sent to Eton at seven, where he learnt nothing, and into the Guards at seventeen, where he learnt less than nothing. His aunt, old Lady Knockdown, who was a kind old Irish woman, an ex-blue and ex-beauty, now a high Evangelical professor, but as worldly as her neighbours in practice, had tried to make him a good boy in old times: but she had given him up, long before he left Eton, as a "vessel of wrath" (which he certainly was, with his hot Irish temper); and since ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... had something comforting and cheering to say to the poor souls. There was a clergyman on board, who also wished to benefit them, but he approached them in an official way, to which they did not so readily respond. One day, when he invited the emigrants to join him in prayer, an old Irish woman replied, "I'd rather play a game o' cards, than hear you prache and pray." She pointed to Friend Hopper, and added, "He comes and stays among us, and always spakes a word o' comfort, and does us some good. But you come and ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... result, and so on for several minutes. Finally, he thought of a remedy, and sitting down, he patiently picked some priming into the tube. This time the gun and Dublin both went off. He picked himself up slowly, and called out in a serio-comic tone of voice, committing the old Irish bull, "Hould, asy with your laffin', boys; there is sivin ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... elementary rules of arithmetic; and it was a great advance to grapple with the grammar of the language. As population and prosperity increased, their almost illiterate teachers gave place to a better class; and many of my Georgia readers will remember as among these the old Irish preachers, Cummings, and that remarkable brute, Daniel Duffee. He was an Irishman of the Pat Freney stripe, and I fancy there are many, with gray heads and wrinkled fronts, who can look upon the cicatrices ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... A little old Irish lady was reduced to selling apples in the street. "Fresh apples, fresh apples!" she would call out; then, to herself, "I hope ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... already compared the shape of Erin to a shield, in which the four Provinces represented the four quarters. Some shields have also bosses or centre-pieces, and the federal province of MEATH was the boss of the old Irish shield. The ancient Meath included both the present counties of that name, stretching south to the Liffey, and north to Armagh. It was the mensal demesne, or "board of the king's table:" it was exempt from all taxes, except those of the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... An old Irish poem on the Hill of Alenn recording the disappearance of the Pagan World of Ireland and the triumph of Christianity by the establishment at Kildare of the convent of Brigit, Saint ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... river Lowne is the only outlet by which all the streams that form the Lakes of Killarney discharge themselves into the sea—'Lan,' or 'Lowne,' in the old Irish signifying full. ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... stone, and always pass them on one side, and return on the other, so as to make a circuit with the sun. Mahommedans make the circuit of the Caaba in the same way. The ancient dagobas of India and Ceylon were also traversed round in the same way, and the old Irish and Scotch custom is to make all movements Deisual, or sunwise, round houses and graves, and to turn their bodies in this way at the beginning and end of a journey for luck, as well as at weddings ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... Physical force may appear a hopeless policy but it was at least worth preparing for, and it may be also it would be worth the trial. This was their creed and this the purpose that animated them. There can be no doubt that through the medium of the old Irish Republican Brotherhood, which had never quite died out in Ireland, communications were kept up with the Clan-na-Gael and other extreme organisations in the United States, and through these avenues also probably with Germany. Indeed the German Foreign Office, quite ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... remind the people that Ireland is not yet a nation and that there are Irishmen who are still willing to die for their country. They've become very English, but they're not altogether English, Henry. They've still some of the old Irish spirit in them, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... conclusion of Faber that this prediction was long before the birth of Christ, and states that one of the reasons for such a conclusion was, that in the old Irish history a similar prophecy appears—a prophecy which was delivered by a "Druid of Bokhara." The identity of this Irish prophecy with the one in the East ascribed to Zarathustra or Zoroaster, is so singular that Faber thinks it can ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... in the middle of the floor and began to recite old Irish poetry, with an exquisite purity of intonation that brought tears to my eyes though I understood but ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... a frowning countenance of reproof upon the impatient old Irish nobleman, and said, with a very dignified air, "That one Duke upon a poor gentleman's hand was enough at a time, and that, but for his present engagement and dependency with the Duke of Buckingham, he would have endured no such terms from the Duke ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... descriptions in the books above referred to. The terrified father called in Dr. Oakes, a zealous leader of the ultra-theocratic party—presently sent to England as joint agent with Mather—who gave his opinion that the children were bewitched. The oldest girl had lately received a bitter scolding from an old Irish indented servant, whose daughter ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the seventh century by Eadfrith, afterwards of Lindisfarne, who died in 721. We are, however, certain as to the date of the bell, for an inscription is upon it, stating it was made to the order of Donnell O'Lochlain, one of the old Irish kings, who came to the throne in 1083, and died ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... for a few minutes, and returned made up as a fat old Irish woman, with a smudge of dirt on my face. There was a ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... the maddest, merriest little mother that ever came back to haunt a lad. By holding tight to the memory he could see that her eyes were blue like his own, but her hair was black. He could hear the ring of her laugh as she told him Irish stories, and the soft drone of her voice as she sang him old Irish songs. It was she who told him about the fairies and witches that lived up behind the peat-flames. He remembered holding her hand and putting his cheek against it when the goblins came too near. Then the picture would go out, like a picture in a magic-lantern ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... the winds of the pampas hurried like Furies through the sordid streets, and stopped to snarl, as a dog snarls, and now moaned, and now howled sharply, as a wolf howls. There was something cold, malignant, about it all ... Old Irish writers said that hell was cold. An Ait Fuar, they called it, the Cold Place. Ait gan chu gan chat, gan leanbh, ait gan ghean, gan ghaire, a place without a dog, or cat, or child, a place without affection or laughter.... Had sainted Brendan come on Buenos Aires in winter on his voyage to Hy ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... a veteran of the Indian Mutiny and Papal war, and a fine old Irish gentleman, arrived to succeed Mr. Johnstone as police magistrate. One of the first cases brought before him was a claim for the return of money, under the following circumstances:—I had received a letter from a man on Hamilton Downs Station, stating he was coming in with ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... all the colleen's winsome looks. The later London whispers of a royal origin had a travestied germ of truth in her father's legendary descent from Brian Boru. He himself seemed scarcely less legendary, this highly coloured squire of the old Irish school, surviving into the Victorian era, like a Georgian caricature; still inhabiting a turreted castle romantically out of repair, infested with ragged parasites: still believing in high living and deep drinking: still receiving ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... us pretty rough last night in the snow," Cargan went on. "That's why I ain't disposed to go in for kid gloves and diplomacy this morning. It's my experience that when you're dealing with a man who's got the good old Irish name of Magee, it's best to hit first ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... indelibly stamped on my memory when I exposed my Chloe for sale in the public market-place. It was in November, a bright, dreamy, Indian summer day. A sadness oppressed me, not unmixed with guilt and remorse. An old Irish woman came to the market also with her pets to sell, a sow and five pigs, and took up a position next me. We condoled with each other; we bewailed the fate of our darlings together; we berated in chorus the white-aproned but blood-stained fraternity who prowled about us. When ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... appointed President. Owen Roe O'Neill was at the same time confirmed in the command of the northern forces, and Colonel Preston in that of the southern. The war was declared to be a Catholic one, to be known henceforward as the Catholic Confederacy, and between old Irish and Anglo-Irish there was to ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... with him to the little wayside station. Cy, gotten up in great style, followed, while the rear was brought up by a motley procession,—all eager for the honor of carrying some of the belongings. The Squire, with Don the old Irish setter, stood in the doorway until Billy passed out of sight; then the two together, the old man and the old dog, went ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... return we found the last of the old harpers, blind, and with a genuine old Irish harp, and after hearing his national melodies for half an hour, taking a cup of coffee, and enjoying a little more of Lady Byron's conversation, we departed, having had a day heaped up with the richest and best enjoyments. I could not help thinking, as I was walking ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... Bridget-Mary, Alyse, and Alethea Bawne—consulted his favourite spiritual director, and, as advised, offered his thin white hand and piously regulated affections to Miss Nancy McIleevy, niece and heiress of McIleevy of McIleevystown, the eminent County Down brewer, so celebrated for his old Irish ales and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... any creative art can have deliberate intention, to make this change, a change having more meaning and implications than a few sentences can define. When I was first moved by Lord Dunsany's work I thought that he would more help this change if he could bring his imagination into the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with their vague Eastern air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... believers in magic. In more than one Italian legend which I have collected a sorceress or goddess evolves a life from her own soul, as a fire emits a spark. In fact, the fancy occurs in some form in all mythologies, great or small. In one old Irish legend a wizard turns a Thought into a watch-dog. The history of genius and of Invention is that of realizing ideas, of making them clearer and stronger and more comprehensive. Thus it seems to me that ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... having been read before the Dublin Natural History Society, and which was received by that gentleman from Sir William Betham, Ulster King-at-Arms, an authority of very high importance on any subject connected with Irish antiquities. Sir William says,—'From the mention of the wolf-dogs in the old Irish poems and stories, and also from what I have heard from a very old person, long since dead, of his having seen them at 'The Neale,' in the county of Mayo, the seat of Sir John Browne, ancestor to Lord ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... make a second attempt but nerved herself to it by the thought of the questions Sandford Berry was sure to ask of her. On the first floor she knocked at several doors, and although she found no clue to the old lace knitter, she soon found a welcome from a voluble old Irish woman, who hospitably invited her in. Her eyes were that bad, she explained, that she couldn't see to do much. Her family worked in the factory all day, and she was glad of ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of the ancient harp of Ireland. But it is as a memory-deep, wonderful, and abiding, yet a memory. I sometimes think I have forgotten, and then I hear coming through this Virginia the notes of some old Irish melody, the song of some wayfarer of Mayo or Connemara, and I know then that Ireland is persuasive and perpetual; but only as a memory, because it speaks in every pulse and beats in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... around Dannie, patted his back and cheered him, and he was introduced to Mister O'Khayam, of Boston, who tried to drown the clamor enough to tell what his name really was, "in case of accident"; but he couldn't be heard for Jimmy yelling that a good old Irish name like O'Khayam couldn't be beat in case of anything. And Dannie took a hasty glance at the Thread Man, to see if he wore that hated pleated coat, which lay at the ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Bradley hated so in one particular—he had his armour on. It was a huge mud turtle, which had most inadvertently attempted to cross the road from the river into the low grounds, and a waggon had gone over it; but the armour was proof, and it was only frightened. So the old Irish labourer, after examining the great curiosity at all points, took it up carefully and restored it to the element it so greatly needed—water. Was he ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... will not have the consequences of the 'weariful old Irish duel between Honour and Hunger judged by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "You dear, splendid, old Irish gentlewoman! Is there anybody in the world in the least like you? Of course you were right when you announced that I never would think of the really practical things we should require for our work over here. But, although I spent as much money as I could possibly ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... Dear Old Irish Vegetable: Gee, but you ought to see dad and I right now at a hotel, waiting for a chance at a room, when a bride and groom get ready to vacate it, and go somewhere else. This hotel is full of married people who look scared whenever there is a new arrival, and I came pretty near ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... give it me for the gratitude you bear me?' 'Yes,' said I; 'and for Dungarvon times of old.' 'Well, Shorsha,' said he, 'you are a broth of a boy, and I'll take your benefaction—five pounds! Och, Jasus!' He then put the money in his pocket, and springing up, waved his hat three times, uttering some old Irish cry; then, sitting down, he took my hand and said, 'Sure, Shorsha, I'll be going thither; and when I get there, it is turning over another leaf I will be; I have learnt a thing or two abroad; I will become a priest; that's the trade, Shorsha! and I will ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... excellent house; and Sophy and Barry and all the children are to stay with us till Sophy's health—very delicate—is strengthened, and till they have furnished what rooms they mean to inhabit at Annamore; this looks better than with the gh, but Sophy stickles for the old Irish spelling. ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... novel breed, The Shannon retriever, untried: His master, an old Irish lord, In an oaken armchair snored At ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... expected group emerged from the prison door and was greeted by a roar that curdled the blood in at least one woman's heart there, an old Irish hag, who sat in a coign of vantage, hugging her knees and crooning, a little black pipe held in her toothless jaws, ceased her dismal hum to concentrate all her ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... quarry of the Highland as of the Hibernian hound. Legend has it that Prince Ossian, son of Fingal, King of Morven, hunted the wolf with the grey, long-bounding dogs. "Swift-footed Luath" and "White-breasted Bran" are among the names of Ossian's hounds. I am disposed to affirm that the old Irish Wolfhound and the Highland Deerhound are not only intimately allied in form and nature, but that they are two strains of an identical breed, altered only in size by circumstance ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... seems to have been the bugbear of her maternal parent. I'm even beginning to believe there's something in the old tradition about ancestral traits so often skipping a generation. At any rate, that crazy-hearted old Irish grandmother of mine passed on to me a muckle o' her wildness, the mad County Clare girl who swore at the vicar and rode to hounds and could take a seven-barred gate without turning a hair and was apt to be always in love or in debt or in hot water. She died too ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... unquestionably, according to the testimony of the old deaf servant, who had been fifty years at Wauling, that identical piece of "holy candle" which had stood in the fingers of the poor lady's corpse, and concerning which the old Irish crone, long since dead, had delivered the curious curse I have mentioned against ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... come back delighted with his adventures. Every little common incident—three little boys with their backs to a wall looking up at a church tower: he would catch snatches of their talk, speculations about deep things and strange; he would note that an old Irish apple-woman in a grimy English town left her basket, with all her stock-in-trade, outside in the street while she went into a church to commune with her heavenly friends; the conversation between a sapient publican, a friendly constable and a group ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... cabin. All through the day happiness flooded her heart. While she waited on Holt or helped Mrs. Olson cook or watched Swiftwater while he put up the tent in the lee of the cabin, little snatches of song bubbled from her lips. Sometimes they were bits of old Irish ballads that popped into her mind. Once, while she was preparing some coffee for her patient, it was ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... family. The next two hours were spent by the Borelands in extracting quills from the repentant Kobuk. For the first time in his life, perhaps, the pain-racked animal was soothed and cheered during the hated operation by quaint old Irish terms ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... when Abraham was just over twenty, he fell in love with Anne, or Annie Rutledge, at New Salem. Her father kept the tavern where Lincoln boarded. But the girl was engaged to a dry-goods merchant, named McNeil. This man, pretending to be of a high old Irish family, likely to discountenance union to a publican's daughter, shilly-shallied, but finally went East to get his folks' consent. He acknowledged that he was parading under borrowed plumes, as he was a McNamara in reality. He stayed away so long ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... are just as fond of her. Indeed it is their loyalty to this old Irish nurse that gives me faith that they are not the cold propositions they sometimes seem to be. For once when, after much careless delay, a fragmentary message came to us that she was ill and in a hospital my two daughters, who were just starting for a ball, ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... think that most o' the trappers hereabouts are as wise as yourself on it, though, mayhap, they don't say it just in the same words. There's Waller, now, as 'll tell ye that when he 'can't help it he guesses he'll jist grin an' bear it.' And there's an old Irish trapper that's bin in the mountains nigh forty years now, and who's alive at this day—if he bean't dead—that used to say to himself when ill luck came upon him, 'Now, Terence, be aisy, boy; an' av ye can't be aisy, be as aisy as ye can.' So you see, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... long before the establishment of surnames in Ireland. In the year 435 their ancestor, Duach Galach, King of Connaught, was baptized by St. Patrick on the banks of Loch Scola, and they had remained Christians of the old Irish Church, which appears to have been peculiar in its mode of tonsure, and of keeping Easter (and, since the twelfth century, firm adherents to the religion of the Pope, till Dowell O'Reilly, Esq., the father of the present head ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and filthy. We go in at two places to sample the tenantry. In the first we find an old Irish woman who lives here with her two boys. She keeps house for them in two little rooms. Everything is poverty-stricken and dirty. The poor old woman is a wreck in body and in mind. She has buried seven daughters. She says, "I've buried ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... and I wept and sobbed until the cold grey dawn peered in upon me through the small dim window. I have passed many a long cheerless night, when my dear husband was away from me during the rebellion, and I was left in my forest home with five little children, and only an old Irish woman to draw and cut wood for my fire, and attend to the wants of the family, but that was the saddest and longest ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... at least, plunged into a deep melancholy, sitting before a huge fire entirely oblivious to the presence of others in the room. Mrs Berkeley, who, with the vicar himself, was a caller, thinking to produce some good effect upon the gloomy man, sat down at the piano and played some old Irish and Scottish airs. After a time Borrow began to listen, then he raised his head, and finally "he suddenly sprang to his feet, clapped his hands several times, danced about the room, and struck up some joyous melody. From that moment he was a different man." He told them ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... prodigious bigness for their age. I tried to weigh them in my arms, and find them twice as heavy as people almost twice their age; and yet I am apt to believe they are very young. Their father a little sorry fellow, and their mother an old Irish woman. They have had four children of this bigness, and four of ordinary growth, whereof two of each are dead. If, as my Lord Ormond certifies, it be true that they are no older, it is very monstrous. So home and to dinner with my wife and to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to London and was taken by an artist friend [Henry Scott Tuke, A.R.A.] to the National Gallery where he became very enthusiastic about the Terbourgs. They then went for a walk and, in Kensington Gore, near one of the entrances to Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, there was an old Irish apple-woman sitting with her feet in a basket, smoking a pipe and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... lightly against the door-post of the Cafe des Exiles as a child leans against his mother, running his fingers over a basketful of fragrant limes, and watching his chance to strike some solemn Creole under the fifth rib with a good old Irish joke. ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... natives had found out that to cheat the white man first was the only possible way of keeping even with him. The maxim of the king of Apamama, quoted by Ivan Stroganoff, was pertinent. Hospitality was as sacred to the Tahitians as to the old Irish. It was shameful not to give a guest anything ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... constitution of the Church—for such is the subject of his tract; and that implies that the Romanizing movement was no longer in its infancy. There were many bishops and presbyters who had become dissatisfied with the old Irish method of Church government. They desired to bring it into conformity with that of the Roman Church. But they were in some uncertainty as to the nature of the changes that should be made, and so they asked Gilbert to ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... were very simple. His father was a British officer quartered at Montreal, of a good old Irish family. From his account he was an ungovernable boy, imperfectly educated, and tyrannizing over a loving but weak mother. When seventeen years old he saw a young girl at church whose appearance he described as being of angelic beauty, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... and all his charm, Warren Gregory was not a romantic figure in the eyes of most women. He had inherited from his old Irish mother a certain mildness, and a lenience, where they were concerned. He neither judged them nor idolized them. They belonged only to his leisure hours. His real life was in his club, in his books, and in the hospital world where there were children's tiny bones to set. He was ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... residence in the land which he had chosen as the scene of his labours. Annual fairs were held on his feast at Aberdour (Fife), Dunkeld each for eight days Drymen (Stirlingshire), Largs (Argyllshire), and Fort-Augustus (Inverness-shire). St. Columba's holy wells were very numerous, for an old Irish record relates of him: "He blessed three hundred wells which were constant." In Scotland they are to be traced at Birse (Aberdeenshire), Alvah and Portsoy (Banffshire), Invermoriston (Inverness-shire), Calaverock (Forfarshire), Cambusnethan (Lanarkshire), Alness (Ross-shire), ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... man and I a young one. I am an old man now, and you—you dear good old soul—must have gone to your reward long ago, where you in your turn will be hearing from St. Brigid herself, and from the fine old Irish king who gave the Curragh, the true story of the miraculous mantle; and how the king did not make such a bad bargain after all, for, in exchange for his gift, he now, doubtless, has what St. Brigid promised, a kingdom ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... 'The National Observer' was dead, Henley dying & our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in Paris very sad and I think very poor. 'Nobody will employ me now,' he said. 'Your master is gone,' I answered, 'and you are like the spear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy- juice that it might not go about killing people on its own account.' I wrote my first good lyrics and tolerable essays for 'The National Obsever' and as I always signed my work could go my own road in some measure. Henley often revised ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... frequently referred to then as "The Irish Renaissance," because Ireland contributed most to it and because it was in Ireland that it acquired its most definite purpose. This purpose was to retell in English the old Irish legends and the still current Irish folk-songs, and to catch and preserve the moods of Irish men and women of to-day, especially those moods which came to them out of their brooding over Ireland, its history, its landscape, the temper of its people. It would be absurd, of course, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... him, without a penny in his purse, as completely dependent on his father as he was when he first went to school at eleven years of age! And for Loughshane, a little borough in the county Galway, for which a brother of that fine old Irish peer, the Earl of Tulla, had been sitting for the last twenty years,—a fine, high-minded representative of the thorough-going Orange Protestant feeling of Ireland! And the Earl of Tulla, to whom almost ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and Beowulf and the Njal's saga, yet Norsemen and the early Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the Old Irish Tain ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... even upon the abuse itself. Franks were given away freely to other persons for their use, they were even sold, and, moreover, they were forged. Senex, in his notes on Glasgow Past and Present, describes how this was managed in Ireland. "I remember," says he, "about sixty years ago, an old Irish lady told me that she seldom paid any postage for letters, and that her correspondence never cost her friends anything. I inquired how she managed that. 'Oh,' said she, 'I just wrote "Free, J. Suttie," in the ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... as a wandering knight, it was because they thought of them as live men, and took means to make them live for the reader or listener. The realism of the early literature of the Middle Ages is perhaps best seen in old Irish. The monk bewails the lawlessness of his wandering thoughts, which run after dreams of beauty and pleasure during the hour of divine service. The hermit in the wood describes, with loving minuteness, ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... thought and "come-all-ye"s and poetical saying; nor is it only among the poor that the old thought has been for strength or weakness. Surely these old stories, whether of Finn or Cuchulain, helped to sing the old Irish and the old Norman-Irish aristocracy to their end. They heard their hereditary poets and story-tellers, and they took to horse and died fighting against Elizabeth or against Cromwell; and when an English-speaking aristocracy had their place, it listened to no poetry indeed, ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... stranger, And far from my own." We invited her in, We offered her share Of our humble cottage And our humble fare; We bade her take comfort, No longer to moan, And made the poor stranger Be one of our own.' Old Irish Song. ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the ladies," was the maxim of an old Irish peer, remarkable for his homage to the sex; "the only way in the world that a true gentleman ever will attempt to look at the faults of a pretty woman, is to shut ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... night. Littlefield pretended to be our guide, but we got lost, and remained two days and nights in the woods, without food, and completely at fault as to which way to steer. At length we ventured out into a high-way, by open day-light, and good luck threw an old Irish seaman, who then lived by fishing in [missing]. After a little conversation, we told this old man we were deserters from a vessel of war, and he seemed to like us all the better for it. He had served himself, and had a son impressed, and seemed to like the English navy little ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... property, that while a few of the richer sort can wantonly pamper appetites of every kind, and indulge with the affluence of so many monarchs, the poor, alas! who make at least ninety-nine of every hundred among them, are under the necessity of going clad after the fashion of the old Irish, whose manners and customs they retain to this day, and of feeding on potatoes, the most generally embraced advantage of the inhabitants, which the great Sir Walter Raleigh left behind him."[30] This writer's remarks apply chiefly to Cork, Waterford, Kerry, and Limerick. He proceeds: ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... will do for us, bad journalism, and novels by girls that could get no other jobs; but a child looks for those things in a tale that are simple and noble and epic, the things that Earth remembers. And so they tell, over there, tales of Sarsfield and of the old Irish Brigade; they tell, of an evening, of Owen Roe O'Neill. And into those tales come the plains of Flanders again and the ancient towns of France, towns famous long ago and famous yet: let us rather think of them as famous names and not as the sad ruins ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... exclusion, as far as possible, of isolated archaisms, and to have the defective distinctions of the MSS. supplemented by diacritics. I have not hesitated to substitute (¯) for (´) as the mark of length; the latter ought in my opinion to be used exclusively—in Icelandic as well as in Old English and Old Irish—to represent the actual accents ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... interest for Irish priests, as the Irish recensions of it, found in the Bangor Antiphoner (to be seen in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin) are of the greatest value to scholars engaged in critical study. They date from the tenth century, and give Nicetas as the author. The wording in the old Irish Antiphoner differs in some verses from the text given in our Breviary. Thus, in verse 6, the Bangor text has, universa before the word terra; again, in verse 18, the Breviary reads "Tu ad deteram Dei sedes," Bangor, ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... myself, I should have deferred writing till a better opportunity, if it were not to satisfy the curiosity of a friend; a friend whom you, Sir, will be glad to have made curious, as you originally pointed him out as a likely person to be charmed with the old Irish poetry you sent me. It is Mr. Gray, who is an enthusiast about those poems, and begs me to put the following queries to you; which I will do in his own words, and I ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... Old Irish illuminated MSS., the rarest in the world—no nation having attained the same perfection as the Irish in that department of taste—and specimens of ancient sculpture from before the Christian era, excited the attention of the lovers of antiquity, and admiration ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan |
