on a door or a table; no man could shuffle, or treble, or cut, or spring, or caper with him.  Indeed it was said that he could dance “Moll Roe” upon the end of a five-gallon keg, and snuff a mould candle with his heels, yet never lose the time.  The father and mother were exceedingly proud of Phelim, The former, when he found him grown up, and associating with young men, began to feel a kind of ambition in being permitted to join Phelim and his companions, and to look upon the society of his own son as a privilege.  With the girls Phelim was a beauty without paint.  They thought every wake truly a scene of sorrow, if he did not happen to be present.  Every dance was doleful without him.  Phelim wore his hat on one side, with a knowing but careless air; he carried his cudgel with a good-humored, dashing spirit, precisely in accordance with the character of a man who did not care a traneen whether he drank with you as a friend or fought with you as a foe.  Never were such songs heard as Phelim could sing, nor such a voice as that with which he sang them.  His attitudes and action were inimitable.  The droop in his eye was a standing wink at the girls; and when he sang his funny songs, with what practised ease he gave the darlings a roguish chuck under the chin!  Then his jokes!  “Why, faix,” as the fair ones often said of him, “before Phelim speaks at all, one laughs at what he says.”  This was fact.  His very appearance at a wake, dance, or drinking match, was hailed by a peal of mirth.  This heightened his humor exceedingly; for say what you will, laughter is to wit what air is to fire—­the one dies without the other.

Let no one talk of beauty being on the surface.  This is a popular error, and no one but a superficial fellow would defend it Among ten thousand you could not get a more unfavorable surface than Phelim’s.  His face resembled the rough side of a cullender, or, as he was often told in raillery, “you might grate potatoes on it.”  The lid of his left eye, as the reader knows, was like the lid of a salt-box, always closed; and when he risked a wink with the right, it certainly gave him the look of a man shutting out the world, and retiring into himself for the purpose of self-examination.  No, no; beauty is in the mind; in the soul; otherwise Phelim never could have been such a prodigy of comeliness among the girls.  This was the distinction the fair sex drew in his favor.  “Phelim,” they would say, “is not purty, but he’s very comely.  Bad end to the one of him but would stale a pig off a tether, wid his winnin’ ways.”  And so he would, too, without much hesitation, for it was not the first time he had stolen his father’s.