For the first ten years of his life Phelim could not be said to owe the tailor much; nor could the covering which he wore be, without more antiquarian loire than we can give to it, exactly classed under any particular term by which the various parts of human dress are known.  He himself, like some of our great poets, was externally well acquainted with the elements.  The sun and he were particularly intimate; wind and rain were his brothers, and frost also distantly related to him.  With mud he was hand and glove, and not a bog in the parish, or a quagmire in the neighborhood, but sprung up under Phelim’s tread, and threw him forward with the brisk vibration of an old acquaintance.  Touching his dress, however, in the early part of his life, if he was clothed with nothing else, he was clothed with mystery.  Some assert that a cast-off pair of his father’s nether garments might be seen upon him each Sunday, the wrong side foremost, in accommodation with some economy of his mother’s, who thought it safest, in consequence of his habits, to join them in this inverted way to a cape which he wore on his shoulders.  We ourselves have seen one, who saw another, who saw Phelim in a pair of stockings which covered him from his knee-pans to his haunches, where, in the absence of waistbands, they made a pause—­a breach existing from that to the small of his back.  The person who saw all this affirmed, at the same time, that there was a dearth of cloth about the skirts of the integument which stood him instead of a coat.  He bore no bad resemblance, he said, to-a moulting fowl, with scanty feathers, running before a gale in the farm yard.

Phelim’s want of dress in his merely boyish years being, in a great measure, the national costume of some hundred thousand young Hibernians in his rank of life, deserves a still more, particular notice.  His infancy we pass over; but from the period at which he did not enter into small clothes, he might be seen every Sunday morning, or on some important festival, issuing from his father’s mansion, with a piece of old cloth tied about him from the middle to the knees, leaving a pair of legs visible, that were mottled over with characters which would, if found on an Egyptian pillar, put an antiquary to the necessity of constructing a new alphabet to decipher them.  This, or the inverted breeches, with his father’s flannel waistcoat, or an old coat that swept the ground at least two feet behind him, constituted his state dress.  On week days he threw off this finery, and contented himself, if the season were summer, with appearing in a dun-colored shirt, which resembled a noun-substantive, for it could stand alone.  The absence of soap and water is sometimes used as a substitute for milling linen among the lower Irish; and so effectually had Phelim’s single change been milled in this manner, that, when disenshirting at night, he usually laid it standing at his bedside where it reminded one of frosted linen in everything but whiteness.