"The editor is seated with a countrywoman at the door of her cottage in an isolated place. Three young girls on their way to a dance come along. They adjust their head-shawls, showing off a little. "They are pretty girls," the editor says to the householder. "If they were hanged for their beauty, they'd die innocent," is her reply. This is a real piece of wit. She did not want to contradict one who is her guest. He has shown, however, that his standard of beauty leaves something to be desired. Her judgment of the beauty under consideration is reasonable, but the expression of it is imaginative. When one puts imagination at the service of criticism, the result is apt to be a piece of malice, and Irish wit is often malicious. An illustration in a Dublin journal shows two farmers seated on a boundary fence. "I don't see a gap in the moon tonight," one says; and the other answers, "If you did you could let your cows in through it." This strikes at the farmer who would save forage by letting his cows into his neighbor's field through a gapped fence."