often through a groupe of many islands, always to many leagues round their different sanctuaries; and often lasting three or four days, sometimes a week, according to his or her reputation for sanctity; so that including Sundays, the average cannot be less than 110 or 120 days lost to the community in a year. This alone is a heavy tax on the agricultural classes, by whom it is most severely felt; but its consequences are more so, from the habits of idleness and dissipation which it engenders and perpetuates. These feasts are invariably, after the procession is over, scenes of gambling, drinking, and debauchery of every description.
"And mony jobs that day begun, Will end in houghmagandie."[1]
Thus they unsettle and disturb the course of their la-
- ↑ This word is defined by the Standard Dictionary (New York, 1895) as a Scottish slang word meaning "unlawful sexual intercourse." It is apparently allied to the obsolete Northumbrian word "houghen-moughen," meaning "greedy, ravenous"—see Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, iii (London, 1902), p. 247.–Eds.
