“I presume,” said I, “that the champions who thus expose their persons and lives in the cause of another, are Glonglims?”

“There,” said he, “you are altogether mistaken.  In the first place, the prize-fighters seldom sustain serious injury.  Their weapons do not endanger life; and as each one knows that his adversary is merely following his vocation, they often fight without animosity.  After the contest is over, you may commonly see the combatants walking and talking very sociably together:  but as this circumstance makes them a little suspected by the public, they affect the greater rage when in conflict, and occasionally quarrel and fight in downright earnest.  No,” he continued, “I am told it is a very rare thing to see one of these prize-fighters who is a Glonglim; but most of their employers belong to this unhappy race.”

On looking more attentively, I perceived many of these beings among the spectators, showing, by their gestures, the greatest anxiety for the issue of the contest.  They each carried a scrip, or bag, the contents of which they ever and anon gave to their respective champions, whose wind, it is remarked, is very apt to fail, unless thus assisted.

Having learnt some farther particulars respecting this singular mode of litigation, which would be uninteresting to the general reader, I took my leave, not without secretly congratulating myself on the more rational modes in which justice is administered on earth.

When we had nearly reached our lodgings, we heard a violent altercation in the house, and on entering, we found our landlord and his wife engaged in a dispute respecting their domestic economy, and they both made earnest appeals to my companion for the correctness of their respective opinions.  The old man was in favour of their children making their own shoes and clothes; and his wife insisted that it would be better for them to stick to their garden and dairy, with the proceeds of which they could purchase what they wanted.  She asserted that they could readily sell all the fruits and vegetables they could raise; and that whilst they would acquire greater skill by an undivided attention to one thing, they who followed the business of tailors, shoemakers, and seamstresses, would, in like manner, become more skilful in their employments, and consequently be able to work at a cheaper rate.  She farther added, that spinning and sewing were unhealthy occupations; they would give the girls the habit of stooping, which would spoil their shapes; and that their thoughts would be more likely to be running on idle and dangerous fancies, when sitting at their needles, than when engaged in more active occupations.

This dame was a very fluent, ready-witted woman, and she spoke with the confidence that consciousness of the powers of disputation commonly inspires.  She went on enlarging on the mischiefs of the practice she condemned, and, by insensible gradations, so magnified them, that at last she clearly made out that there was no surer way of rendering their daughters sickly, deformed, vicious, and unchaste, than to set them about making their own clothes.