Page:Sleeping beauty of the wood (3).pdf/22

This page has been validated.

22

ust the more readily the more marvellous they were.—His master having gone one day to Belfast, he went to old Brien Sollaghan's wake, where a lad just eome home from a foreign voyage was telling stories out of the eourse of nature, improbable. Paddy believed all he was relating but something about blaekamoors; for he swore "'twas impossible for one man to be blaek, and another man white, for he could not be naturally blaek without he was painted; but," says he, 'Ill ask the master in the morning, when he eomes home, and then I'll know all about it.' So he says in the morning, 'Master, is there any such a thing as a blackamoor?' 'To be sure there is, as many as would make regiments of them, but they're all abroad.' 'And what makes them black?' 'Why, it's the elimate, they say.' 'And what's the elimate?' 'Why I don't know: I believe it's something they rub upon them when they're very young.' 'They must have a deal of it, and very cheap, if there's as many of them as you say.—The next time you're in Belfast, I wish you'd get a pieee of it, and we'll rub little Barney over with it and then we ean have a blaekamoor of our own. But as I'm going in the Irish Volunteer, from Larne to Ameriea, in the spring, I'll see them there. Paddy went over as a redemptioner and had to serve a time for his passage. One day he was sent by his master six