title: Tagines: Lost skills in cookery,craft, and culture (The Curious Peasant) (Volume 2)
author:  Victoria Osborne 
description: Victoria Osborne is a born-again peasant. Having worked at a variety of jobs including riding teacher, deck hand on a traditional three-masted schooner, school registrar, business manager, and specialist antique dealer, she has now turned her hand to telling others about the skills she has picked up over the years. She has experimented with self-sufficiency, living on a smallholding in Wiltshire where she has kept chickens, bees, rabbits, quail, sheep, pigs, horses and, most recently, a working donkey. She grows her own vegetables, cures and smokes her own bacon and ham, makes bread for sale and for her familys consumption. She has made wine, baskets, soap, preserves, and built a replica Iron Age roundhouse, as well as a coracle. She has most recently been studying for a PhD in artisan cheesemakers, only giving this up when the natural curiosity of the peasant took over! Visit her website at www.thecuriouspeasant.co.uk
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  # The Poor Scholar
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### William Carleton
  
  
  This page formatted 2005 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
      
      
      The Poor Scholar
  
  
  Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of
  
  
  William Carleton, Volume Three
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
  
  Produced by David Widger
  
  
  
  
  
  TRAITS AND STORIES OF THE IRISH PEASANTRY
  
  
  BY WILLIAM CARLETON
  
  
  
  
  
  PART VI
  
  
  [Illustration: Frontispiece]
  
  
  [Illustration: Titlepage]
  
  
  
  
  
  THE POOR SCHOLAR.
  
  
  One day about the middle of November, in the year 18—, Dominick
  
  
  M'Evoy and his son Jemmy were digging potatoes on the side of a hard,
  
  
  barren hill, called Esker Dhu. The day was bitter and wintry, the men
  
  
  were thinly clad, and as the keen blast swept across the hill with
  
  
  considerable violence, the sleet-like rain which it bore along pelted
  
  
  into their garments with pitiless severity. The father had advanced
  
  
  into more than middle age; and having held, at a rack-rent the
  
  
  miserable waste of