It was drawing near Christmas and we were gathered one night in the Forge, joking and laughing and smoking, and discussing various matters of no importance with Ned M\'Grane, the jovial and kindly blacksmith of Balnagore. After a time the talk naturally turned on the great festival that was near at hand, and all the old and new observances that came with it as sure as sparks came when the smith\'s sledge hit the heated steel or iron on the anvil. And Ned, who was in his best form, was willing to talk in his own humorous fashion about everything connected with Christmas, from three-foot high candles to penny bugles, and from plum puddings to holly and ivy.
"I wonder who invented the sort of a Christmas we have nowadays?" said Ned, as he lighted his pipe and laid the sledge on the anvil. "I\'m told that in the big towns an\' the cities they start buyin\' Christmas presents in the middle o\' summer, so as to get them cheap, an\' that some people go near losin\' their mind tryin\' to think o\' what to give this person an\' that an\' strivin\' to figure out what they\'re goin\' to get themselves from their friends. Long ago the people thought it good enough to give an\' get a Christmas greetin\' at the fair or market or comin\' home from Mass or goin\' the road, but now you have to go to the town or send away to Dublin or London or somewhere[Pg 111] for a bit of a card with a green robin redbreast on it, an\' holly berries, an\' about five feet o\' snow, an\' you must put it in a letter an\' stamp it an\' post it to the man or woman that lives next door to you, an\' that you\'ll be talkin\' to five minutes before an\' after he gets it. An\' he must do the same thing for you, an\' if his card looks cheaper than yours, although you\'re after sendin\' him a printed verse about good-will an\' eternal friendship an\' charity an\' peace, you won\'t stop talkin\' about his meanness for a month o\' Sundays. I don\'t know what Christmas is comin\' to at all."
"I wonder who thought o\' the first plum puddin\'," said Joe Clinton, as he looked meditatively into the big turf fire that Ned kept burning in a huge open grate for our special benefit. "Whoever he was, he didn\'t think he\'d sicken so many people before the end o\' the world. Some o\' the things they call plum puddin\'s are a holy terror. An\' the fun of it is that they never put as much as the skin of a plum in one o\' them."
"Well, Joe," answered Ned, "I don\'t know who took out the plum puddin\' patent first in the world, but I know who was the first who tried to make one in Balnagore, an\' I know what happened to it, an\' how often it was laughed over for many a long day after." And Ned chuckled softly as he coaxed mighty clouds of blue and white smoke from his veteran pipe. We saw at once that there was a story behind his remark, for Ned\'s brain was a storehouse for yarns, and our hearts thumped with excitement as we waited breathlessly for Joe Clinton to say the word that would set Ned\'s tongue working.
[Pg 112]
"Who was that, Ned—I never heard of it," said Joe at last.
"It was Judy Connell," Ned answered, as he looked away into the shadows as if his gaze was fixed on a cinematograph picture that had suddenly appeared on the far wall of the forge, "an\' I remember it the same as if \'twas only yesterday, though it\'s a good twenty-five years since it happened. In them times the only sort of a puddin\' people had at Christmas was a bit o\' rice an\' a few currants in it, an\' it was a bigger luxury than you\'d imagine, because it\'s little o\' sweets or dainties the old people bothered their heads about: an\' signs on it there wasn\'t a fellow for pullin\' teeth an\' stuffin\' teeth at every fair an\' market, nor bottles by the score in every \'pothacary\'s shop window for the cure o\' constipation an\' twenty other \'ations\' an\' \'isms\' that the people o\' them days knew nothin\' about. An\' sure nearly every man brought a full set o\' teeth to the grave with him an\' left them there to be dug up when some other man was goin\' down on top of him. Nowadays every second man you meet has teeth made out o\' melted lead or somethin\' tied on to his gums with wire, an\' some people have plum puddin\' for their tay every time a friend or relation comes to see them, an\' they have to keep on the dresser a bottle o\' somethin\' or other to shift the plum puddin\' out of their stomach the next day. That\'s how things has changed in this country since I was a gossoon.
"But I\'m ramblin\' away from Judy Connell\'s plum puddin\'.
"Judy was as plain an\' simple a little woman as[Pg 113] ever went under a shawl, an\' had no more airs or notions than any of her neighbours, an\' it wasn\'t conceit or a wish to be better than the next that made her think o\' makin\' the puddin\'. But the lady she was at service with before she married Mickey Connell, used to make her a present o\' some little thing every Christmas, an\' this year that I\'m talkin\' about didn\'t she take it into her head to send Judy a parcel o\' raisins an\' currants an\' spices an\' candy peel an\' all the other queer things they mix up together, and wrote down all the rules an\' regulations for makin\' the things grab on to each other an\' turn out a plum puddin\'. Mickey wanted to give the things to the pigs instead o\' goin\' on with any foolishness, as he said, but the childre coaxed an\' coaxed until they got the soft side o\' the mother, as the like o\' them will, an\' she said that on account o\' them that sent the things an\' the times that were in it, she\'d try her hand, come death or glory, at ma............