The Old Hag’s Rhyme
Source: The Stone Fiddle by Paddy Tunney
Location: New Edition, page 119 / 120 (Poem)
Ere last night, about three weeks ago, I received a letter telling of of an old hag’s death. I was so over-joyed at the sad news that every tear that feel from the nose of my belly split fifteen fathoms of turf and set a mill a’ going.
I put my two shin bones in my pocket and my head under my arm, and away goes I, sitting down every minute, till I met John Jarvis, a hackney coachman, driving nineteen dead jackasses in an empty steam coach heavily laden with seventy-seven grander buck magpie and seventy-seven rounds of buck stirabout, which was to appear at the Battle of Sebastopol.
I asked him where the old hag lived, and he said: “On a high hill in a low valley, where the wind never blew, nor the cock never crew, behind up and down street where a mad dog bit a hatchet and pigs wrestled from stirabout.”
I marched on till I came to the Curragh of Kildare where I saw a man run away with a stack of chimneys on his back. There were twelve little boys and thirty-sic little girls playing hide-and-go-seek round a hayrick built of stones. There I say a dog barking as a pockmarked cat that was knitting a pair of stockings and dying with the chincough.
I pushed on till I came to a wall that no higher than a cabbage stalk and no longer than from Patrick’s Day to New York. There was an old woman taking a drink out of the River Liffey. I pushed her in, and she was immediately burned alive in a blaze of cold water and drowned in a shower of feathers.
I then fell severely ill with a holic-colic in my big toe, a toothache in my shin bone and a headache in the back of my bladder. I was sent to the Rock Hospital where I took a fit of laughing for thirteen days and twenty-two nights, I was ordered a physic of thirteen pints of eels’ beastings, seven ounces of frogs’ butter and some cockroaches’ kidneys. All these were boiled up in a large, iron, wooden, leather pot.
I then threw up lap-dogs, slap-dogs, water dogs and terriers.
At the time there was a great battle raging in the ocean of green pays. The general was severely wounded. A bullet struck him in the stomach and knocked his appetite asunder.
The names of the officers were: Annie Hab, Glister and Gig, Harry McAlly, John McAlly, Peg o’ the Rump, Hop off the Bench, Badly Mad, Bad Pay Run Away and Stand Still.