Irish Peasant Weddings.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 142, 25 March 1909, Page 3

Irish Peasant Weddings.

The well-informed writer, who signs herself "Matrin Ross" says that love matches are rare. It is the inexorable fact, that marriages are rushed into every day, loveless, sordid marriages, such as we are taught to hold in abhorrence, and that from them springs, like a flower from a rlust heap, the unsullied, uneventful home life of Western Ireland. It is even more than passive domestic toleration that blossoips in the cramped and dirty cabin life; affection grows with year <, and where personal attraction never counted for much, the loss of .it hurts nobody. 'Their hearts were within each other,' was said of an elderly couple who, thirty years before, had been married in the priest's kitchen on the last night of Shraft; married as a happy thought, and by tbe merest chance. The lawful bride had taken ber place by the side of the bridegroom, but changing her mind at the last possible moment, sprang from her knees and declined the ceremony. As her betrothal was probably an affair of that afternoon, it was not so dramatic an action as might be assumed, nor dii it cause any hitch in the proceedings. The priest looked round the wellfilled kitchen. 'Here, Mary Kate,' he said to his servant, 'come on you and marry the man! Sure you wouldn't let bim go away, and be after walking five miles in the rain!' Mary Kate knelt down by the bridegroom; we do not hear of remonstrance on her part, and thirty years afterwards, when their children were married *r gone to America, it was said that this couple's hearts were within each other. It was said with perfect perception of the ways and the deeps of devotion, but the absence of it at their wedding was not worthy of remark, and in these things is the esence of the Irish nature, that keenly perceives sentiment, and contentedly ignores it. 'She isn't much, indeed.' said a farmer, of exceeding astuteness, when questioned about his matrimonial intentions,' but she's a mate little clerk.' By this was delicately conveyed the fact that she could read and write, and that he could not: The marriage was highly successful. Years afterwards a friend said to him in congratulation: 'Well, James, I bear you married your daughter well.' 'I did. sir, and I got bim cheap.' Then, in a whisper, 'He was divilish owld,.' The computation by which tbe years of tbe bridegroom were set against the purchase money, in other words, the bride's dowry, must have been an intricate one.