Behind the farmer, generally sat either a wife or a daughter,
remarkable for their scarlet cloaks and blue petticoats; sometimes with
shoes and stockings, and very often without them. Among those assembled,
we cannot omit to mention a pretty numerous sprinkling of that class
of strollers, vagabonds, and impostors with which the country, at the
period of our tale, was overrun. Fortune-tellers, of both sexes, quacks,
cardcutters, herbalists, cow-doctors, whisperers, with a long list
of such cheats, were at the time a prevailing nuisance throughout the
kingdom; nor was there a fair proportion of them wanting here. That,
however, which filled the people with the most especial curiosity,
awe, and interest, was the general report that nothing less than a live
conjurer, who had come to town on that very evening, was then
among them. The town, in fact, was crowded as if it had been for an
illumination; but as illuminations, unless they could be conducted with
rushlights, were pageants altogether unknown in such small remote towns
as Rathfillan, the notion of one had never entered their heads.
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