Some Characteristics of Irish Folklore. 267
devotions " at " the Stone of Pain," ^^ I have no clue, but by degrees the pilgrimage, like many another, became less of a pilgrimage and more of a junketting, till the proceedings grew so notorious that the authorities intervened. No pilgrim adventures on the dangerous pathways of the Great Skellig to-day, and only rumour tells of old maids being taken off in boats to the rocks. Somewhat similar was the Waterford custom of Drawing the Log on Ash Wednesday, noted by the Halls in their Tour (vol. i. p. 315), a log being ducked, not a man, after it had been drawn by a rope through the streets to a chorus of:
" Come draw the log, come draw the log ; Bachelors and maids come draw the log."
The Skellig list customs are entirely confined to the South, and even the name is for the most part unknown in Ulster. Chalk Sunday — when the boys chalk the backs of the unmarried — is, however, observed in all four Pro- vinces, though I have only heard of Puss Thursday from Munster and Connaught.-'^ Puss Thursday being the first Thursday in Lent, so that those who are not already married will probably continue so throughout the year — hence their disconsolate looks. " A puss on you " means an ugly face.
Ulster has her own peculiar Calendar Customs — though their observance is not entirely limited to that Province. One might revise the phrase and say Protestant Ireland has its own peculiar customs, with a passing note that, so deeply has religious severance gone, days recognised mutually by Protestant and Roman Catholic in England, for example Ash Wednesday — may be almost completely
^ Lecky, History of Ireland, vol. i. p. 407.
-"Chalk Sunday appears to vary, and be either Quinquagesima or the First Sunday in Lent, as in some places — Co. Mayo, per ex. — the boys waylaid and chalked the coats of eligible bachelors when assembling for Mass, as a sign that they ought to have married before that Sunday. Elsewhere it was done to show they should get married before Lent set a period to such doings.
