He had not, however, MacConglinne’s hatred of the Church and clergy, for when the fruit of his meditations did not ripen well, or when the crowd called for something more solid, he would recite or sing a metrical tale or ballad of saint or martyr or of Biblical adventure.  He would stand at a street comer, and when a crowd had gathered would begin in some such fashion as follows (I copy the record of one who knew him)—­“Gather round me, boys, gather round me.  Boys, am I standin’ in puddle? am I standin’ in wet?” Thereon several boys would cry, “Ali, no! yez not! yer in a nice dry place.  Go on with St. Mary; go on with Moses”—­each calling for his favourite tale.  Then Moran, with a suspicious wriggle of his body and a clutch at his rags, would burst out with “All me buzzim friends are turned backbiters”; and after a final “If yez don’t drop your coddin’ and diversion I’ll lave some of yez a case,” by way of warning to the boys, begin his recitation, or perhaps still delay, to ask, “Is there a crowd round me now?  Any blackguard heretic around me?” The best-known of his religious tales was St. Mary of Egypt, a long poem of exceeding solemnity, condensed from the much longer work of a certain Bishop Coyle.  It told how a fast woman of Egypt, Mary by name, followed pilgrims to Jerusalem for no good purpose, and then, turning penitent on finding herself withheld from entering the Temple by supernatural interference, fled to the desert and spent the remainder of her life in solitary penance.  When at last she was at the point of death, God sent Bishop Zozimus to hear her confession, give her the last sacrament, and with the help of a lion, whom He sent also, dig her grave.  The poem has the intolerable cadence of the eighteenth century, but was so popular and so often called for that Moran was soon nicknamed Zozimus, and by that name is he remembered.  He had also a poem of his own called Moses, which went a little nearer poetry without going very near.  But he could ill brook solemnity, and before long parodied his own verses in the following ragamuffin fashion: 

    In Egypt’s land, contagious to the Nile,
    King Pharaoh’s daughter went to bathe in style. 
    She tuk her dip, then walked unto the land,
    To dry her royal pelt she ran along the strand. 
    A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw
    A smiling babby in a wad o’ straw. 
    She tuk it up, and said with accents mild,
    “’Tare-and-agers, girls, which av yez owns the child?”

His humorous rhymes were, however, more often quips and cranks at the expense of his contemporaries.  It was his delight, for instance, to remind a certain shoemaker, noted alike for display of wealth and for personal uncleanness, of his inconsiderable origin in a song of which but the first stanza has come down to us: